Forbes: Are We Burying The Lead On The Upheaval In Tech?

Are We Burying The Lead On The Upheaval In Tech?

Two dominant narratives are circulating about the tech industry. One is that massive layoffs are affecting the entire industry, and the other is that the people getting laid off are disproportionately women and people of color. The first is overstated; the second is a serious problem that requires long overdue action.

The Layoffs That Are Grabbing Headlines

Yes, the so-called Big Tech companies are laying many people off, perhaps for the first time in our collective memory, but they do not represent the entirety of the tech industry — and they never have.

It’s past time that we embrace a complete picture of what we mean when we talk about “tech” companies. “Tech” isn’t just the Googles and Metas of the world, but also the thousands of companies across sectors — from finance to retail, healthcare to telecommunications, and beyond — that employ tens and tens of thousands of software engineers and other technical staff.

Tech Nation published an interesting discussion about what makes a tech company a tech company and concluded that  “To qualify as a tech company, a company has to make new technology (whether or not they sell it to an end user), use it to differentiate themselves, and be driven by the values of innovation and collaboration.”

Perhaps instead of referring to companies outside of Big Tech as “legacy companies,” we should more accurately refer to them as tech companies that exist inside “legacy industries.” This is not just a ‘labeling’ distinction; it has important implications for those working to drive diversity, equity, and inclusion in the tech industry.

Amid the somewhat hyperbolic news of massive tech layoffs, these more broadly defined tech companies are, for the most part, not laying people off — and what’s more, many are actively recruiting. If you are trying to diversify the tech industry, it’s essential to keep these companies on the radar; and to develop strategic relationships and innovative programming with them  because they can be and are great places to start and grow a tech career. As someone who started and grew my career at Verizon, first as an AI applied researcher and eventually as a CIO, I never doubted that I had a ‘tech career’ in the telecom industry.

And for those who subscribe to the stereotype that tech inside these legacy industries is uninteresting, not cutting edge, not innovative, and not impactful – think again.

CVS Health, the merger of CVS and Aetna, recently laid out their ambition to use AI, virtual care, and connected devices to reimagine consumer access to healthcare. Walmart has been saying for years that their growth depends on their ability to harness AI, Big Data, and Robotics technology. Did anyone doubt that Pfizer was a tech company in the pharmaceutical industry when they leveraged mRNA technology to produce the COVID-19 vaccine in record time successfully?

Think that ‘back-office’ technology is not strategic? Consider the recent debacles in the airline industry. Significant breakdowns at Southwest Airlines around holiday travel can be traced back to a failure in so-called ‘back-office’ systems.

The Bigger Problem

As painful as this staffing ‘correction’ in Big Tech is for those impacted, the bigger problem in what is happening right now is not a lack of tech jobs writ large; it’s the lack of diversity in the people who hold and hold onto their jobs when times get tough. 

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, companies claimed to make their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) efforts more of a priority. In the pandemic, when Big Tech saw business booming, and they increased their hiring accordingly, this included many so-called “diversity hires” and hiring talent management professionals specializing in DE&I. But research shows that recent layoffs have disproportionately impacted women and employees of color and that the recent right-sizing of these organizations has led to the erosion of DE&I efforts nationwide. What’s more, the DE&I teams themselves are being disproportionately laid off. This is, in a word, unacceptable, but it reveals that the ‘commitment to diversity’ has often been a commitment without substance.

First, let’s acknowledge that companies generally do what is in their best interest, including what is best for their shareholders, the environment, society, and employees. If companies truly believed that more diverse teams were a strategic business priority, they wouldn’t shed their new diversity hires and their DE&I professionals when times get tough. Instead, as Alexandra Kalev said, “The only way not to lose your diversity is to make a plan not to lose it.”

Second, as is always the case with reinventing your business, ‘bolt-ons’ don’t deliver transformative change, whether that is bolting a new technology onto an outdated business process or, in this case, attaching a ‘diversity objective’ onto current recruitment and retention practices. This approach will not transform an organization’s diversity in any meaningful way and only signals a lack of understanding of the root causes of the problem.

What has been required from the outset is a commitment to change the core operations of how we recruit and retain tech talent; including an acknowledgment that the same tools, approaches, and rubrics that we’ve used in the past won’t get us where we need to go. This kind of serious business process redesign has been needed from the start. Anything short of that is window dressing that can easily be swapped out for next year’s trendy fashion.

When we see companies embrace a systemic reboot of their tech recruitment and retention engines, we can take it as a signal that they understand the nature and origin of the diversity in tech problem and therefore understand how to address it. Only then will we see systemic change in the future of the tech workforce.