Google and Personnel: Progress or Regress?
July 5, 2021
I read a write up from Verdict, a UK information service. The story “Google: We’re Hiring Lots of Minorities! Sadly They Are Leaving Even Faster” provides some useful information about Google’s management practices. The story reports:
Big Tech has a diversity problem, a fact underlined by Google’s latest diversity report revealing how minorities are leaving Mountain View in droves.
And from whence does this factoid come? Heh, heh, the information comes from the Google, if the Verdict story is on the money. Google issued an annual diversity report. I think this was the first one since the diversity report for 2014. Hey, we are on Internet time, so those seven years are really many, many more. Logically, if Google operates on Internet time and that “time” is accelerated, the Google is not late. Google is on time and on target. Non Googlers need to process Google’s definition of annual and understand that the faster you go, stuff slows down to observers. Hence, 2021 is simply the next annual report in the quantum supremacy world. Google uses a variation of this logic when it misses European regulators’ requests for documents by invoking the “dog ate my homework” enhancement.
Onward. The article includes this interesting passage:
True to form, the latest report kicks off by highlighting all the efforts that it’s made to ensure diversity among its staff. Some highlights to that end include how 84% of Google’s people managers have completed unconscious bias training and that Mountain View has spent $55m since 2014 to boost economic empowerment for women. To put that last figure into perspective: that’s 0.4% of Google’s total revenue of $13.059bn from 2020…
And there’s more:
Hiring among black employees jumped from 5.5% to 8.8% between 2020 and 2021. Similarly, hiring of Latin employees jumped from 6.6% to 8.8%. However, hiring of Asian employees shrunk from 48.5% to 42.8% and Native American hiring slumped from 0.8% to 0.7%. The hiring of white employees rose from 43.1% to 44.5%.
The article includes a somewhat negative statement too:
However, the report also reveals that Google is bleeding staff from ethnic minorities.
And here are the data presented by Verdict:
The biggest change was seen among its black staff. The attrition index demonstrated a jump from 112 in 2020 to 121 in 2021 among black employees. It was particularly bad for black women, whose attrition rate grew from 110 to 146 over the last year. For black men, the number decreased from 114 to 106. A similar increase was seen among Latin employees, with the rate of attrition increasing from 97 to 105 over the period. For women in the group, attrition decreased from 93 to 81. For the Latin men, it jumped from 98 in 2020 to 117 in 2021. For women in the group, attrition decreased from 93 to 81. For the Latin men, it jumped from 98 in 2020 to 117 in 2021. The attrition of Native American Google employees grew from 131 to 136. The increase was led by by Native American women whose attrition rate increased from 123 in 2020 to 148 in 2021 while the men in the group saw attrition decrease from 143 to 127.
Hmmm. The next report will be due next year. Please, don’t forget to calculate what annual means in Google speak.
Stephen E Arnold, July 5, 2021
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