Updated Apple diversity numbers show growth in hires of black, female, and Hispanic workers

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  • Reply 81 of 112
    richlrichl Posts: 2,213member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post



    Why. Their entire occupation can be automated. The job does not need to exist. Better to hire three specialized, educated humans (three shifts) to oversee the workings of a completely automated fast food machine building than to hire dozens of humans who spit in food, screw up orders, etc. The demand for work of greater intelligence increases, moving the human race forward.

     

    If their job can be automated, why hasn't it? Probably because cooking fast food is more complex than you think.

     

    Out of curiosity, what do you do for a living?

  • Reply 82 of 112
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member

    And that's why the Federal minimum wage needs to be eliminated. Unskilled employees make no sense at $9 or $15/hr., but they might be eminently employable at $5/hr. or whatever rate the two parties can agree on. It would allow companies big and small to hire people of all skill levels and allow them to get a foot in the door. The minimum wage keeps people unemployed... the opposite of its intended effect.

    No it doesn't.
  • Reply 83 of 112
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member
    I just can't understand why people think that Apple will not hire the right people for the job. It's foolish to think they'd go out of their way to hire someone less competent because of his ethnic origin just to score some brownie points.
    Would Apple jeopardise their position by wilfully hiring less competent people? It doesn't make any sense to me.

    If you devise quotas then that is inevitable.

    As a non-American I'm always surprised that whites from anywhere are considered a homogeneous group and Americans of different facial colour a heterogeneous group that can add to diversity with different ideas. The different cultures of Europe are more distinct from each other than the different historical racial groups in the U.S. (Obviously new immigrants would have distinct cultures though).

    So I'm confused how diversity works in that case.

    Listening to the WWDC, there were a lot of non-American accents.
  • Reply 84 of 112
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member
    richl wrote: »
    If their job can be automated, why hasn't it? Probably because cooking fast food is more complex than you think.

    Out of curiosity, what do you do for a living?

    The only way to automate is to pre-cook. There are vending machines that sell burgers pre-cooked that need you to reheat. Obviously they are shite.

    Otherwise the job is clearly fairly complex. It's basically a resource allocation problem as well as a cooking problem and hard enough to solve.
  • Reply 85 of 112
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    asdasd wrote: »
    No it doesn't.

    Yes it does. Provably.
  • Reply 86 of 112
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    asdasd wrote: »
    The only way to automate is to pre-cook. There are vending machines that sell burgers pre-cooked that need you to reheat. Obviously they are shite.

    Otherwise the job is clearly fairly complex. It's basically a resource allocation problem as well as a cooking problem and hard enough to solve.

    http://www.salon.com/2015/05/10/robots_are_coming_for_your_job_amazon_mcdonalds_and_the_next_wave_of_dangerous_capitalist_disruption/
  • Reply 87 of 112
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    If their job can be automated, why hasn't it?

    Because economic forces haven’t dictated it. Until now. There’s a reason that you’re both hearing about and seeing wholly automated fast food production machines for the first time.
    Probably because cooking fast food is more complex than you think.

    It’s not, though; machines literally exist to do it end to end now. Touchscreen ordering devices, a slot for your money, and a slot for the finished food. Boom. Now the only human needed is the repair guy and the driver (self-driving semi) who wheels the individual “food” product into the store itself (humanoid robot). And as soon as battery tech sees a breakthrough…
    Out of curiosity, what do you do for a living?

    Not an occupation that can be automated. ;)

    I’ll tell you, though; once manual labor is automated, manual labor–of all forms–will be done for health, sanity, and out of personal desire.
    As a non-American I'm always surprised that whites from anywhere are considered a homogeneous group...

    I imagine that’s because it’s the case genetically.
  • Reply 88 of 112
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member
    Yes it does. Provably.

    Nope. Economics is largely computerised astrology in any case, with less predictive power but what Econ 101 says about wage increases is belied by the facts. In most states or countries with moderate minimum wage increases there has been no record of increases in unemployment. Funny that libertarians ignore aggregate demand feedback loops in these cases but claim that wages don't decrease in times of mass migration.
  • Reply 89 of 112
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member

    Because economic forces haven’t dictated it. Until now. There’s a reason that you’re both hearing about and seeing wholly automated fast food production machines for the first time.
    It’s not, though; machines literally exist to do it end to end now. Touchscreen ordering devices, a slot for your money, and a slot for the finished food. Boom. Now the only human needed is the repair guy and the driver (self-driving semi) who wheels the individual “food” product into the store itself (humanoid robot). And as soon as battery tech sees a breakthrough…
    Not an occupation that can be automated. ;)

    I’ll tell you, though; once manual labor is automated, manual labor–of all forms–will be done for health, sanity, and out of personal desire.
    I imagine that’s because it’s the case genetically.

    Genetics have little or nothing to do with culture.
  • Reply 90 of 112
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member

    The problem with machines is they are stupid. If I don't like tomato, which I don't, it's a trivial task to ask a human to not add it, less so with the machine.

    We've had machines replacing or augmenting some jobs in the service industry for decades. In general these are either the simplest of tasks (ATM, Vending machines) but even there we still have human tellers and shop assistants, or the machines need human input ( self service cashiers). The latter is just making the customer do the work instead of the worker.

    And people don't really like that. I could make coffee in Starbucks ( after all the machine does most of the work there too) like I do at home but I'd prefer not to.

    In any case what extreme capitalists tend to forget is that one man's consumption is another mans income. Machines don't spend. Lose all your workers and you lose all your consumers.
  • Reply 91 of 112
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    I'm surprised and appalled by the number of people who automatically equate diversity with "lower standards" in hiring.

    That probably comes from the assumption that Apple would already have an efficient hiring process in place and are not discriminating against women or minorities. If that assumption were true then if the numbers are too low, the conclusion would be that the applicants haven't made it through the process and the resolution to that would be to lower the bar for them. This has been done in other professions. In the fire services, they recognized that they had too few women and so tried to recruit more but the applicants couldn't carry people nor the ladder adequately because they have a different body type so they had to lower (or change) the entrance requirements just for them.

    Companies should be focusing on the cause and not the effect. They are looking at their staff and it's not that they are unhappy with the quality of the work so their aim can't be to improve employee performance. What they are looking at is numbers and ratios and that is solely what they are unhappy with. In their view, the quota is wrong. You have to have a quota in your mind that you are happy with and this should be the same as the population of the country. If you were running a company in Asia, India, Africa and so on, you wouldn't look around and think 'we need to hire more white people'. You would assume that your employee diversity matches the diversity of the population because it is statistically impossible for every company to hire more than the ratio of people that exist in the population, any differences come from over-hiring one and under-hiring another.

    Apple's US numbers are the following:
    White 54%, Asian 18%, Hispanic 11%, Black 8%, Multiple 2%, Other 1%, Undeclared 6% <- undeclared and other are the ones buying those 'other' tablets
    Male 69%, Female 31%

    The US workforce diversity is the following (it will differ by region too, California has more Hispanic, fewer Black):
    http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsrace2013.pdf

    White 79%, Asian 6%, Black 12%, Multiple 2%, Other 1%
    They mention that Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race as there are black and asian hispanic. The majority of hispanic are white though and 16% total. If we take the Hispanic numbers out like Apple but leave Black Hispanic as Black and Asian Hispanic as Asian:

    US Workforce: White 65%, Asian 6%, Hispanic 15%, Black 12%, Multiple 2%, Other 1%
    Apple: White 54%, Asian 18%, Hispanic 11%, Black 8%, Multiple 2%, Other 1%, Undeclared 6%

    You can see what the problem is here right away. They aren't over-hiring white people, they are over-hiring Asian people (a minority) by 3x their population, which negatively impacts Black and Hispanic by a fairly small amount (~25%). They are already under-hiring white people vs the population.

    They have fewer women than the population, where the workforce ratio is:
    Male 53%, Female 47%

    but women hold 50% of all jobs so they are in higher numbers in other professions like education, healthcare, human resources (who are responsible for hiring all the men).

    Intel has their own numbers here:

    http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/diversity/diversity-at-intel.html

    They are massively over-hiring Asian employees. They have also taken issue with their numbers and have recently taken a more drastic measure, which is doubling the referral fee if you recommend a preferred candidate:

    http://www.cnet.com/news/intel-ups-referral-bonus-to-achieve-more-diversity-in-its-workforce/

    They will pay an employee up to $4k for recommending a non-white, non-male candidate vs up to $2k for white male. That's essentially putting a price on people's heads based on their ethnicity or gender. This has a double effect in that minority and female candidates are more likely to be in the social network of an existing employee matching those criteria so they are discriminating against new white male hires and existing employees. If an existing employee has friends with one matching the preferred criteria, the other not and they get paid $4k for one and $2k for the other, who is more likely to be recommended regardless of their talent?

    While the social network effects are clear, this doesn't seem to explain Asian people not suffering from this at all and in fact doing better than white people so there's more to this than just hiring people who match themselves.

    If the assumption being made is an inefficient hiring process that is simply overlooking minority and female candidates then a resolution to that would be to get more people in the door and through the process and an assumption that they will be given an easier time during the hiring process wouldn't be justified. However, this has happened before and as mentioned earlier, it's clear they aren't at a loss for skilled workers, they simply don't like the ratios therefore the hiring incentive is not to improve the quality of work but the ratios and the quickest way to do this is to make the entry requirements 'different' i.e lower. This is what they do with exams in schools. They get pressured to have students reaching certain grades so rather than educate the kids better, they lower the bar.

    It's not fair to reach any conclusion without knowing all of the hiring process but one inconvenient truth always stands out. Asians are one of the smallest minorities and don't benefit from common social networks in Western countries and yet do far better than anyone, even white people.

    One suggestion that has come up is the social structures that have been in place for hundreds of years that treated women and certain minorities as lower class citizens. How long an influence this has is not certain. If you met someone from Germany or Russia, would the World Wars and Cold War influence how you dealt with them? Not likely, generations act on their own experiences or on what they are taught.

    To take an opposing side to any kind of reverse discrimination is always going to seem as though it's to promote discrimination but the ultimate aim is equality. Equal has a definition, which means that things are considered the same with no exceptions. When you make exceptions then you promote inequality by definition. This is where there would be a suggestion that there is always hidden inequality that you can't see or prove and reverse inequality is to undo that but the way that a rational society moves forward is with evidence. When we look at things like pay for women, the evidence to provide to justify an assumption of sexism is hourly wages for the same jobs in the same companies with the same experience. This is never provided. When it comes to diversity in hiring, the evidence to prove discrimination would be to show qualified minority or female candidates being rejected or overlooked. Again, this is never provided. All that people provide (partly because of how much work it involves to get fine-grained data) are numbers that show aggregate effects and make assumptions about victimization and then explicitly discriminate in reverse. Only the latter discrimination has evidence. Not that it doesn't exist but it's rarely proven to exist and just assumed.

    The other consideration though is what the side-effects will be. If companies are hiring minorities and females on top of their existing hiring then there shouldn't be much negative impact on anyone else if the wages they get are matching people with the same experience. At worst they are denying newly opened opportunities to certain groups, which is a bit unfair but they wouldn't have existed anyway. This would result in a very slow change as Apple's number here show because to undo hiring Asian employees 3x more than their population, you have to over-hire the other minorities by a huge amount on the assumption that Asian hires continue at the same rate and you don't start turning down good employees.

    Eventually, there will have to stop being special considerations for people who are underrepresented, this kind of thing has no reason to continue for hundreds of years. If a Western company was all a minority or all female, would they be called up for being discriminatory in their hiring? If not why not? People can't redefine the terms 'equality' and 'discrimination' based on their preferred outcomes. There is nothing in Apple's numbers that would suggest they have discriminatory hiring policies unless people consider over-hiring Asians to be a form of discrimination.

    I wouldn't suggest they stop promoting diversity. Sending out a message of inclusion is a good thing to do but they need to tackle the root causes of any problems they see and not simply look for preferred outcomes. If they survey certain groups and ask if they want to be programmers or engineers and they resoundingly say they don't then this is not a problem that needs solved. In most cases the root problem will come down to money. Most people will want more of it. People don't just want jobs, they want good paying jobs or rather the best return on investment (highest pay for the least work). This is why people take issue with representation at the upper levels more than the entry level positions.
  • Reply 92 of 112
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    asdasd wrote: »
    Genetics have little or nothing to do with culture.

    Yeah, that’s patently false. Why would you even try to claim that?
  • Reply 93 of 112
    tyler82tyler82 Posts: 1,100member
    What has Tim Cook done to Apple? First the Apple Watch flop and now this? What a ninny. Apple needs real leadership, not a bleeding heart that lives in a 99% white wealthy neighborhood yet preaches to everyone else about diversity.
  • Reply 94 of 112
    Should businesses be forced to adopt racist diversity policies to combat what may or may not be attributed to "real" racism in their hiring practices?
  • Reply 95 of 112
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    Forced? By their management? Yes, management should have the power to "force", i.e. "manage", the businesses that they are in charge of however they see fit.
  • Reply 96 of 112
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Originally Posted by Crowley View Post

    Forced? By their management? Yes…

     

    Rather think he’s not talking about internal affairs.

  • Reply 97 of 112
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    ^ well since all of Apple's diversity programme so far has been an internal affair then he's barking up the wrong tree.
  • Reply 98 of 112
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    Crowley never learned how to use the quote function in the chat here... Close your eyes and think of England.
  • Reply 99 of 112
    dasanman69dasanman69 Posts: 13,002member
    Crowley never learned how to use the quote function in the chat here... Close your eyes and think of England.

    He knows full well how to use it. For some reason he chooses not to.
  • Reply 100 of 112
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    dasanman69 wrote: »
    He knows full well how to use it. For some reason he chooses not to.

    Sloth?
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