House of Eratosthenes

CIO World has an article for executives who want to achieve the ultimate IT mission, which is doing more with less. Oh no! It isn’t about that at all! It’s about fostering diversity.

“We’ve heard jokes—more than jokes—about not being able to understand the accents of people at the call center,” says the CIO [of one Fortune 500 company], who asked not to be identified for this article. “Our team decided that we had to make it clear that we won’t accept that kind of behavior. Our business case is that in today’s environment, you have to be able to accommodate different cultures and lifestyles.”

The matter was discussed in leadership team meetings, with managers expected to communicate the company line to their own staffers. Surveys, interviews and call tracking were used to determine the extent to which real language barriers existed. In a small number of cases, where the mockery was “severe and pervasive with an individual,” the CIO says, the behavior became an issue for human resources.

Diversity has become a byword of good management in corporate America, with information technology organizations intoning the mantra as often as anyone. “Diversity is a characteristic of a good group,” says Ken Harris, CIO of Shaklee Corp. “Part of an IT manager’s job is understanding diversity and allowing it to flourish.”

Do I agree? Absolutely yes, if the word “diversity” is subject to the most positive definition imaginable. If I turn to my dictionary I see it says…

di·ver·si·ty (n.)
1. the state or fact of being diverse; difference; unlikeness.
2. variety; multiformity.
3. a point of difference.

I think it’s fair to say that when we absorb this word as a glittering sugary bit of fluff, what we have in mind is something a little different: Apathy and neutrality. “I Don’t Give A Good God Damn” ness. Someone can get the job done, and if it’s a white dude or a black one or a red one or a yellow one, or a woman, or a transgender…what the hell.

Well, in promoting it, we more often adhere to the dictionary definition which says you do care. If this guy over here is one color, that guy over there has to be something different. I don’t think most people have that in mind when they acknowledge the “benefits of diversity.” Furthermore, if you listen to people in authority talk about it long enough, you realize this dictionary definition isn’t what they’re talking about either.

Ten people, all of the same ethnic minority, work for you. Two of ’em quit and you replace them with white guys. The dictionary definition, above, says you just increased “diversity”; everything was the same before, now you have eighty-twenty. But that isn’t the concept we have in mind at all, is it?

No, apparently not:

Technology may be tougher to diversify than some other disciplines. For one thing, IT shops have a history of being largely male in makeup, with a certain boys’-club reputation.

I would argue an important part of the source of that “boys’-club reputation” is a pinheaded mindset that because a certain thing exists a certain way, it must be a ring of chauvinistic males making it that way. It ain’t necessarily so; fifty thousand women made the choice to drop out of the IT profession between 1999 and 2003 in the wake of the dot-com bust. Part of the reason may have to do with staff availability:

Women aren’t less capable of doing math and science, but they do tend to be less available when it comes to working long hours after having a child, unless they have a husband with a 9-5 job. Those all-night programming sessions or the week-long visits to foreign fabs to make sure a chip design is implemented correctly are costly to families. For the type of competitive person who ends up in the technology field, deciding between giving 110 percent to solving a technological problem and giving 90 or even 100 percent when junior is sick, is too frustrating. So they back off, because if the game is rigged so you can’t win, smart people pick a new game.

Is that sexist in its own way? Absolutely yes. But she has a point. Men and women are not the same, and we have some fields that don’t attract women — not all of them glamorous. There isn’t much of a movement afoot to diversify the field of garbage men, for example; or truck drivers. We can have a thousand out of a thousand straight white men in those positions, and nobody says boo about it. Shouldn’t that bother someone?

Well, there’s a reason it doesn’t. There are some jobs women don’t want.

Now to be fair about it, in my years in IT I’ve met some women who were very ambitious and showed more than their fair share of left-brain acumen and capability of mastering the concepts needed. But remember — this is a numbers game. If the overall population is 52% female, and there are fewer than 52% of females in the IT jobs, someone has a new cause.

That simply isn’t right. Nobody should be forcing women into IT if she doesn’t want to be forced into it, and as you swell the ranks of those female IT professionals, you’re going to be running into that as an issue. There just aren’t that many takers.

Now on the language thing…yes, it’s a rare thing that you actually have to choose between solving a problem, and continuing to converse with one specific guy in another country who’s working on the other side of a language barrier. Sooner or later, you can break through. But there are times when that simply isn’t an option. You just can’t understand what the guy is saying, and vice-versa.

And so backed into that corner, I can’t help but wonder what the intrepid systems engineer does about the problem when he works for the anonymous CIO quoted at the top of the story. That CIO admits to sending people to human resources. Wow! Imagine having your career ended because someone else is supposed to be able to speak English, but can’t.

I suppose the problem would go into the “ether.” People who work in IT, I noticed, had a strong tendency to work on the things they knew how to work on. Whatever required “how-to-do” research had a much higher likelihood to just keep gathering dust in the in-box, under stacks of other things. Productive? Certainly not. But safe. There’s nothing racist about not working on something.

That, or I expect the phone “reset” button would be hit accidentally. Yeah, just hang up on the guy you can’t understand, call back and hope to get someone else.

Seriously, this is utopianism. And utopianism is dangerous no matter what its immediate goal. For it assumes 1) things should be a certain way; 2) if things are not that way it’s because there are people running around who have the wrong mindset; 3) if we obliterate people with the wrong mindset, and keep on doing it, we’ll eventually get to where we want to be.

I’ve only seen that work in one way, so far — and that’s with getting rid of crime. Lock up criminals until there’s no more crime being committed. Wouldn’t it be great if we all committed to utopianism on that issue, the one in which it effectively works? But we don’t do that. We’re much more inclined to use utopianism to solve things that aren’t really problems at all…like that, statistically, nerds tend to be boys, and they like talking to people who speak the same language.

Dude. They’re nerds. Professional nerds. Tasked with doing their nerdy things. Once tasked to achieve things as part of a team, they are required to exchange technical concepts in intricate detail. If you had to do that, you’d prefer to speak to people proficient in your own language, too.

And trust me on this — if & when a nerd-chick does happen along, and she can speak the language that is needed, she’ll be accepted into the nerd-crowd. Quite eagerly. Especially if she’s just as likely to be around when a server craps out at three in the morning, as the next fella. You won’t need some diversity program to make it happen, it’ll happen naturally…but she’ll still be outnumbered five-to-one, or more.

That’s just the way things are. If they conflict with Utopian ideals, and you want the Utopian ideals to win, it’ll come at the expense of getting things done. That means servers that go crash in the night, stay crashed.

So, what’s more important?

And trust me on this — if & when a nerd-chick does happen along, and she can speak the language that is needed, she’ll be accepted into the nerd-crowd.

True, dat. One of my supervisors In my last job was a 30-something UNIX goddess, and had forgotten more about sys admin (and coding) than most of the guys her age knew, outright. She was my Number Two employee (do you go thru that annual “ranking” exercise, Morgan?).

OTOH, I had five DBAs working for me at that point, two Indians (from India-Indians), one Russian, and two Americans. The two Indians were Sierra Hotel, technically, but were IMPOSSIBLE to understand, verbally, because of their lack of English skills. That shortcoming caused me NO end of late-night grief and made me think about hiring a frickin’ interpreter/translator. That was kinda strange, coz both could write well in English, but couldn’t speak it worth a damn. BIG problem, that. And one I never fully overcame, either.

There have been nearly as many “crimes” committed in the name of Diversity as there have been in the name of religion, IMHO. Yet we continue to genuflect at this shopworn altar, don’t we?
- Buck | 07/21/2008 @ 16:11
Hey Morgan, how do I get in touch with you?? I e-mailed you a while back but never got a response. Wanted to ask you about something, so let me know!!! 🙂
- Cassy Fiano | 07/21/2008 @ 17:46
Hi Cassy, good to see you here.

1. I sent you an offline, you can reply to that;
2. Under the “recent” posts in the sidebar, there’s a house push button and an envelope push button. You can click on the one that looks like an envelope;
3. Just shoot me something at mkfreeberg@hotmail.com.

All three of those will have the same result.

Buck,

I think the whole concept has become a classic exercise of plutocracy cloaked in a false disguise of democracy. Witness the anti-affirmative action referendums, passed by the people, then blocked by the courts. But then there’s this weird, surreal otherworldly definition of “diversity” which, to those of us who can pay attention to long-standing trends, only makes sense if the d-word is held to mean “NOT ENGLISH SPEAKING WHITE STRAIGHT MALE” — if it means anything else, too much is left unexplained (like my example, above). And so, logically, “our best results and our strength lie in our diversity” must therefore mean “our best results and our strength lie in not hiring English-speaking white straight males.” I do not believe that would be a very effective public relations campaign. But we should all, regardless of our sex & color, reserve our support for things like this that define their terms frankly and without a desire to deceive.

Gah. I should stop writing. The whole thing makes me sick, and it would if I were purple with green polka dots and female. I can’t stand it when elitists go through the motions of “including everyone,” insist on being given their pats-on-the-back as if that’s what they were doing, and in reality systematically go through the steps of targeting pre-selected classes of people for obliteration. And it’s not just here. We’ve got so many people running around using terms like “all,” “everyone” and “everybody” who mean something else entirely, and aren’t even going through the effort of pretending otherwise. We shouldn’t be putting up with it.
- mkfreeberg | 07/21/2008 @ 20:41

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On That D-WordMonday, July 21st, 2008

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Monday, July 21st, 2008