Twitter VP Apologizes for Alienating Minority Employees
Earlier this week, Leslie Miley, Twitter’s only black manager in the engineering department, quit because of how badly the company is managing its attempts at diverse hiring. In a blog post explaining his decision, Miley included a damaging quote from the company’s Senior VP of Engineering. Now the VP is saying he’s sorry.
An apologetic blog post from Senior VP of Engineering Alex Roetter includes a mix of earnest sorry-saying and earnest ass-covering:
“The comments attributed to me aren’t an accurate or complete facsimile, but they conveyed a meaning that was very far from what I intended, which means I did a poor job communicating. That resulted in unnecessary pain and confusion, for which I am truly sorry.”
Roetter also includes a list of initiatives Twitter will undertake in the near future to make itself more inclusive—but it’s hard to tell how this will differ from all the other times a technology company has sworn to do a better job of hiring people who don’t look like Mark Zuckerberg. Roetter concludes by noting “All of the above is only a small start, and we’re going to do a lot more,” and “Ultimately, it’s better to show the world rather than tell the world.” And yet.
Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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