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Google, Apple Call Workers' Race & Gender Trade Secrets
theodp writes "The Mercury News reports that Google, whose stated mission is to make the world's information universally accessible, says the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released. So do Apple, Yahoo, Oracle, and Applied Materials. The five companies waged a successful 18-month FOIA battle with the Merc, convincing federal regulators who collect the data that its release would cause 'commercial harm' by potentially revealing the companies' business strategy to competitors. Law professor John Sims called the objections — the details of which the Dept. of Labor declined to share — 'absurd.' Many industry peers see the issue differently — Intel, Cisco, eBay, AMD, Sanmina, and Sun agreed to allow the DOL to provide the requested info. 'There's nothing to hide, in our view,' said a spokesman for Intel. Some observers note it's not the first time Google has declined to put a number on its vaunted diversity — in earlier Congressional testimony, Google's top HR exec dodged the question of how many African-American employees the company had."
Someone please mod this up! A friend of mine works at Apple, and all her co-workers who are SW developers are from IT contracting outfits in India (yes, they're all Indian, too). She couldn't name a single developer who wasn't a contractor (even the non-Indian was a contractor).
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Ignoring the potentially messy, and unbounded, arguments over whether or not anybody should be bothering to collect these data, what sort of "trade secret" could they possibly be?
Does Google not want Microsoft to scoop them on their new blacksploitation search engine? Would knowing how many women work at Oracle be of the slightest use to a competitor?
Even if the data were valuable, they are nothing that you couldn't easily enough gather with a statistics grad and a pair of binoculars and a few days casing the relevant corporate campuses(not to mention the more exotic methods: With modern analytical chemistry, the threshold for what you can detect is pretty impressive. You could probably get an approximate gender ratio for a given building just by sampling the sewer outflow for excreted hormones. You could probably also gauge morale: If you know roughly how many people are working there, you can watch the concentrations metabolites for various drugs and get a rough aggregate sense of what, and how much, the building is on. More SSRIs and anxiolytics? Bad times. More cocaine? Ambiguous, or 80's flashback...) You can sample people for sex or color pretty quickly, and accurately enough, from a fair distance. If the data were worth more than peanuts, it'd already be available.
They probably want to pick the most qualified worker rather than the most politically correct one. If they end up with an entire workforce full of white employees, perhaps an investigation should be done as to why there are no other qualified candidates in the area.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
They probably want to pick the most inexpensive worker rather than the most politically correct one. If they end up with an entire workforce full of H1B employees, perhaps an investigation should be done as to why there are no other qualified candidates in the area.
FTFY
Watching people get excited about and defend Google gives me terrible nostalgia of Microsoft's history.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
I'm not usually one to demand any particular degree of "diversity" of companies, but it is rather immediately noticeable how Apple's executives all come from the same demographics: white males between 40 and 65. You'd think there'd be at least one person from some other demographic--- it's not like this is the uniformity you see if you walk into a CS or engineering department at a university (ever seen one without a single asian?).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Having walked around the Googleplex, it'd be hard to describe it as dominantly white. There are not too many African Americans, but asians are not absent by a long-shot.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Disclaimer: I used to be on H1-B and am a permanent resident now.
Do not forget that it is 65,000 "new" H1Bs, they are valid for 3 years, renewable once for a theoretical total of 6 years. It is also extendable from year to year pending a change of status, usually while the green card application is being processed. Some people can be on H1-B for 12 years with this. Add to that the fact that H1-B are usually concentrated in a few areas and you get more than 1% of the local "workforce" (not the same as population).
That said I would estimate that the average H1B last 5 years. Personally I think the green card process is broken, if the queue is taking many years to process either the US should put more resources into it (it cost lost of money so it got to be profitable) or be more picky about application and reject them sooner.
I'm a bit annoyed at all the bad press H1-B visas get. Sure there is a lot of abuse, but I like to believe that in my case there was a genuine need for a foreigner. While being on a H1-B I've quit twice and each time for a significantly larger salary. On my last H1-B year my total compensation was double the required H1-B salary. I have a few friends that have been on H1-B and most of them were much more qualified than the average software developer here in Silicon Valley.
You're absolutely right. I've got nothing against US companies using some level of outsourced labor, but if it turns out that they imported 15,000 Serbians (or whatever group) and are using that number to vaunt their "diversity" metric while not tapping the local market for labor, it's the height of cynicism.
The CB App. What's your 20?
How am I a racist? By pointing out that how education is funded in the US is unfair to the poor? Or the fact that statistically speaking, white people are less likely to be poor? It's a fact. You don't solve problems by pretending they don't exist.
US Census, median incomes for 2006:
White: $50,000 / year
Black: $32,000 / year
Hispanic: $38,000 / year
The percentages are also interesting.
Great post, technically correct, but totally ignoring the elephant in the room.
Yes, "equal opportunity" is what you say. "Affirmative action", however, is exactly what you say "equal opportunity" is not.
Both are law. So your whole diatribe basically makes one point : "you're misidentifying the law you're complaining about". Of course, you're acting as if this little mistake invalidates the whole argument.
That's just not how you present your argument : it's a direct attack against complaining about the obvious stupidity of this law. In other words, you agree with affirmative action, with racist quotas (oh sorry I meant "racial" quotas, which means the same thing), and you somehow feel the need to attack anyone disagreeing with you with tiny little details.
Your argument is as idiotic as saying "watr" isn't wet, due to misspelling.