It is vaguely mentioned in the article but I think controlling for the type of schools that students are exiting from is an important factor in determining if there is a "pipeline" problem. For example it was mentioned that Black and Hispanic Tech graduates are more likely to end up in office support roles. Out of the top 20 engineering/computer science programs in the country I doubt almost any students are ending up in those type of roles. So likely Black and Hispanic "Tech" graduates are much less likely to be of top engineering programs. There is an enrollment issue. There is a corporate bias and culture issue. There is a primary school issue... the list goes on.
From working in management consulting I can tell you that even when name-blind resume reads are incorporated and diversity programs are really emphasized (Which they are), the issue comes to when candidates from Black and Hispanic backgrounds show up to an interview they are relatively VERY poorly prepared. This is usually because the student groups at elite colleges that prepare you for tech/consulting/banking jobs are pretty bad at reaching out to minority (Black and Hispanic) students.
The problem is systemic from pre-school to the career fair. I believe it will change. But no one lever will do the full trick.
what systemic problem though? I'm hearing systemic a lot and it's more often looking suspiciously like a way to create a ghost that can't be fought so let's throw more money at any and every program to make a show of it.
You know, the kind of systemic that kept them legally segregated until the sixties -- that is, their parents time, and de facto segregated until today.
Or the kind of systemic that ensures their school districts are poorer and underfunded.
Or the kind of systemic that ensures you take the middle of the road when a black guy in a hoodie walks towards you in the same sidewalk.
Having grown up in the Birmingham, Alabama public education system I can tell you segregation never really ended.
Sure there aren't signs designating black and white water fountains but just because something is not written on a sign or on the law books doesn't mean its not written in the consciousness of the people.
The biggest reason for this in my opinion is the historical obfuscation.
Sure, we kind of studied the Civil Rights movement but we never really learned about Dr. King's deeper message, only that he "had a dream", and then segregation ended and everything was "normal" after that.
It wasn't until years after graduating that I began reading Dr. King's speeches that and the underlying causes of the racial divisions finally made sense, allowing me to let go of the anger I had held from bad experiences related to the racial animosity.
So you're blaming the 60s, 70s and 80s for kids who grew up in the 2000s and don't code now?
Because I don't know a single person who is in the field of IT whose parents were in IT. Positions barely existed until the 90s.
No one has yet explained why even segregation today in some part of the country is affecting ethnic groups NOT interested or apt in coding to the level of getting the jobs.
>So you're blaming the 60s, 70s and 80s for kids who grew up in the 2000s and don't code now?
Those kids didn't develop in vitro in some abstract new environment.
They had parents, grandparents, neighborhoods, school districts, schools, family fortune (or lack thereof) potential employers (themselves born in the 60' 60's and 80s) etc.
Anybody who thinks those things don't affect the nurture, career and prospects of a young person, or that those things change in a few decades, are deluded.
Usually the same people also fail to understand the notion of statistics, and think that outliers that beat the odds and rose to become successful entrepreneurs or whatever from such upbringings translate to "it's equally easy for whites and blacks to become successful, here, this kid proved it, but most blacks are just lazy".
In other words people who don't understand that most white people play life in easy mode, where most blacks do not -- and point to some "hard mode" winners as if that means everything is equally easy for everybody.
Sure thing, so do me a favor, point to one of these under funded minority students - because from what I read, the dept of education figures point to more money per pupil spending on black and hispanice students vs white across the united states regionally and in total - http://www.heritage.org/~/media/images/reports/2011/04/bg254...
Now if you can refute the source, I think that's great because I have a hard time believing it myself given the common narrative. One argument might be that somehow the amounts of money given somehow are squandered other ways, but that doesn't discount the amount given, it would point to the system where it's squandered not the funding itself.
The source is meaningless. Visit some schools in typical white districts and in typical black districts and compare them.
It's easy to have to spend more public money for poor districts since there's much more infrastructure work to be done, plus the students parents don't have enough to spend on their kids education in the first place.
You're actually saying there's something "systemic" that causes ME to behave a certain way when in the presense of a black guy in a hoodie? OKAY. Methinks you don't have a grasp of the word "systemic" Like I said before, you're throwing out ghosts that you can't fight against specifically, to reinforce a claim of what causes entire ethnicities to have interest and aptitude in coding and IT work.
>You're actually saying there's something "systemic" that causes ME to behave a certain way when in the presense of a black guy in a hoodie? OKAY.
It was the general "use" I used (e.g. the phrase could be read "that ensure one takes the middle of the road"). So, even if not you, then hell of a lot of people. Did you think that people who act in that "certain way" are unique snowflakes, and that their behavior is a personal curiosity that doesn't have historical roots and cultural influences?
>Like I said before, you're throwing out ghosts that you can't fight against specifically, to reinforce a claim of what causes entire ethnicities to have interest and aptitude in coding and IT work.
Well, I like some Lynard Skynard myself, but I wouldn't take it that far...
There's no reliable examples. That's what I'm saying, people say "Systemic" when really it means nothing when you drill down to the meat of how things are. In fact when you look closer you find the more forces and initiatives towards inclusion within the system. For example for years we've had minority and female only STEM initiatives. Both on their own, and included within other organizations as part of greater educational pushes.
Occam's razor. Is there a problem in our entire society and schooling system, or are Black and Hispanic backgrounds a liability because of the views and attitudes they have/teach?
Occam's razor. Is there likely to be numerous smaller problems that are easy to ignore in all different areas of life, or few large easy to spot problems in one area of life?
An average IQ one std dev below other groups does not preclude the existence of individuals who have an IQ two std devs above an average member of the other group. https://antidem.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/glantons-law/
> Is there a problem in our entire society and schooling system, or are Black and Hispanic backgrounds a liability because of the views and attitudes they have/teach?
The two are not mutually exclusive. I would argue that a very significant part of the problem that Blacks and Hispanics face (besides simple discrimination on the part of people in positions of power -- which is very real, as studies of responses to applications in various context from people with stereotypically Black or Hispanic names vs. otherwise identical applications without that feature) is attitudes toward societal institutions and mainstream culture in their respective subcultures that are a direct product of problems in the broader society (including the schooling system), both currently and over the past several centuries (the longer time especially for black subculture) including, over much of that time, overt de jure subjugation and exclusion (which while it didn't directly impact young people today, is recent enough that lots of them have living relatives who did directly experience it) followed by covert (but still present, see earlier comment about applications) discrimination and neglect.
Arguing over whether A or B is the problem is pointless when A causes B which then contributes back to A.
Is working as a computer programmer economically rational for high performing black and hispanic students in the United States?
Black and hispanic students benefit from preferential admissions standards to medical, law, business and other graduate schools that can lead to higher salaries and higher social standing than computer programming.
Consider the extreme case of black students and medical school:
Black students who are competitive candidates for software engineering at top tech companies could (probably all) choose to study medicine and, very possibly, be admitted to specialist residency programs.
Average specialist pay is $284,000. Average primary care pay is $195,000.
Medicine has many more barriers to entry: schooling, debt, etc.
I'm a white high school dropout, but I got a developer position at age 27 after rushing through a CS degree later in live which took about ~3 years. I work 40 hours a week and get a very livable $100k+ salary plus stock and benefits with negligible student debt all things considered (~$30k).
My point being, in a vacuum, getting on track to making a good wage as a developer has a lot fewer barriers with the lack of medical school and debt. Not to mention the free time I have outside of work and regular hours. Salary isn't everything.
I cannot speak for people of color and their experience who want to go through the same process as me. There are all kinds of barriers they experience that I don't. Neil DeGrasse Tyson (I know, I know...) had a good answer to the silly question "What's with chicks in science?", and the cultural / systemic barriers he had to go through to reach that point in life [1].
You can do medical school with minimal to no debt from many state medical schools. No way any one rational should chose programming over medicine in terms of dollars per calorie spent working, given they can get admission to medical school. Chose it because you like programming and can't stand the sights and smells of medicine. Not for the money. An average doctor makes more than an average programmer, with better job security, and more prestige, more choice of where to live, less politics at work, less selling your soul for money. Even free time is improving. Many medical sub specialties now offer shift work, part time work etc.
Edit: there are literally medical gigs available where you can sleep all night and get paid $100 / hour while sleeping (specialty surgical hospitals, where many nights there may not be a patient overnight, but they require an md on site). Many emergency rooms in rural areas may not see 2 patients at night, but need an er doctor on site.
Medicine is a bad example. But AA hiring is a (non-illusory) systematic occurrence, and it's perfectly rational for high IQ blacks (who will get snapped up by any large corp) to aim for high-status, high-visibility roles such as administration, rather than squinting at a laptop for decades.
Of course, this is against the narrative, just as is pointing out that lots of people one generation away from medieval levels of poverty in Asia seem to be doing better than USA blacks.
At any rate, if a lack of diversity is prima facie racism, then here's a scoop:
It amazes me that "..they discovered that many black and Hispanic students, unlike white and Asian ones, had never heard of this type of interview and were unprepared for it..."
How could any programmer worth his/her salt would not know about a whiteboard interview? I think that statement encapsulates it. No only are the schools they are graduating from are woefully inadequate, and they are entering a highly competitive field that with a fast changing landscape that is overwhelming for such grossly underprepared grads.
Ask yourself how come Asians & Jews do so well? They just work harder and push themselves more. I am as bleeding heart a liberal as they come and it pains me to see the lack of diversity, but culture has a huge part to play in it.
> How could any programmer worth his/her salt would not know about a whiteboard interview?
A lot of schools don't teach anything about interviewing. Its not academic. In fact, a lot of the training videos used in schools that do teach "job skills" to prepare students make no mention of white board interviews. They talk about being polite, wearing a suit, grooming, etc.
Judging an academic program on if they have ever been exposed to a whiteboard interview is fairly silly. I never saw on in 20 years.
As to your last paragraph, I'm not sure what role culture would play in introducing people to whiteboard interviews. I guess I grew up in a different environment, but I don't remember any of my urban white friends extolling the annual whiteboard festival. I can see it being a economic function of better schooling though.
> They talk about being polite, wearing a suit, grooming, etc.
Yikes, that's even worse. Some cultures will actively hold a suit against a candidate. I can't say I agree with that, but it's a little scary that they're giving stock advice to a highly dynamic field, very little of which is relevant. (Polite is good, being relaxed is better. Being suited is good, being comfortable is better.)
There are still quite a few places that will reject a candidate out of hand for not wearing a suit. I find that troubling, just as I would find the opposite troubling.
Well, stock advise is basically what text book publishers do.
> There are still quite a few places that will reject a candidate out of hand for not wearing a suit. I find that troubling, just as I would find the opposite troubling.
Agreed, this is an indication of toxic culture on both sides.
HOWEVER. I would say aside from the grooming bit, the whiteboarding advice is the best possible advice for anyone. My mother can happily tell me to wear a suit, but she's not in a position to educate me about my field. A school had better fucking be, or what is the point? The technical knowledge—if they teach it at all—is itself is easier gained online than from a school.
> Some cultures will actively hold a suit against a candidate.
Most places I've been wouldn't hold this against a new grad.
However, some places might hold this against a more senior person as being tone deaf toward the position he's going to be in. Nevertheless, I might wear a suit if the CEO, CTO, etc. was going to be part of my interview loop. But, I'll probably ditch the jacket and tie for the VP of Engineering.
A whiteboard is just a proxy for ability to think on one's feet and problem solve under pressure. It could just as well have been a workstation, a paper and pen....
which aren't taught either in the context of a job interview - watch some of the "amazing", "real life" training videos you can get from book publishers.
Maybe it's changed by now, but I was caught badly off guard by my first technical "interview" (exam) out of college. I thought it would be more or less a normal "interview", the tell me about yourself, your interests, your coursework kind of thing. I was completely unprepared for the whiteboard exam part of the interview, which was in C++ (Java was a brand new thing back then) and involved algorithms and data structures (just a linked list, mainly, but with pointers and so forth thrown in).
I failed it miserably. Honestly, the experience left me kind of embarrassed and metaphorically beaten up for a while. Kind of like I'd claimed to be a programmer and had been revealed to be a fraud.
By this point (almost 20 years later), I've been through this wringer so many times that it seems like common knowledge. It doesn't really bother me at this point. But now that I think of it, yeah, I was unprepared for this and unaware of it.
I'm used to this sort of thing now, but I still think it's an usual and really unpleasant part of our industry. Most knowledge based fields really don't have anything like this sort of interview/exam (seriously, it's almost a pure exam, I think that describing it as an interview is simply misleading to people who aren't aware of what goes on in our field) - though most fields have a more standardized set of credentialing and degree programs.
I do think that the mysterious, unpredictable, and stressful nature of tech exam interviews deters a lot of people from entering or remaining in this field.
>How could any programmer worth his/her salt would not know about a whiteboard interview?
These are students. I would not expect them to start their education knowing about whiteboard interviews. At some point, all of us professional software developers were ignorant about how interviewing worked, and then we learned.
The question is: why are black and hispanic students not reaching this level of understanding at the same rate as whites and Asians? Perhaps they're not doing internships at the same rate? Some other reason? Regardless, this question deserves a serious answer, and not a flip dismissal based on stereotypes about work habits.
There was a recent Bloomberg article that really resonated with me when it came to recruiting companies.
High Tech companies rarely recruited at my school (an HBCU) and when they did, they would send some a random manager to talk about diversity, not a recruiter.
One of my best friends for the past 25 years is a very successful black man - a medical doctor, hospital administrator, and finance nerd. Back when he was in med school, he got arrested in a dormitory laundromat for stealing laundry. Cuffed and kept in jail overnight, because someone else left their socks in his washing machine. That sort of thing just doesn't happen to white medical students. The kind of aggression and neglect he and others like him suffer at the hands of authority is stunning.
As for "They work harder"... consider the impact of multiple generations of success, versus multiple generations of failure. I grew up what southerners call "poor white trash". I escaped, but barely, and mostly because I was very determined and very smart. When I landed at a high quality private college, I was utterly unprepared for the experience. I grew up listening to my father refer to the wealthy men he worked for as "educated mow-rawns", in that thick Kentucky accent of his. Going to college, surrounded by the children of lawyers and professors and the like, their family life was as alien to me as my dad bouncing in and out of jail was to them. I was embarrassed and ashamed.
Now, throw in the past century of crap that has kept even hardworking and talented black families down, and you can see where the problem might start.
I think that should be further specified. It's not just that culture matters, but cultural expectations and the environment that leads to.
See, I listen to a lot of rap, or "black music". And differences in taste aside, some of the stuff is REALLY complex. Look at Nas, Tupac, or even more recently, Kendrick Lamar. The sheer amount of detail these guys put into their art makes me feel bad about myself as a programmer. These guys work hard at their craft. But you know what, they're not coders.
But here's the thing, quoting Kendrick Lamars "Black Boy Fly": "The only way out the ghetto, you know the stereotype
Shooting hoops or live on the stereo like top 40".
The reason why they're not programmers is the same reason why I'm not a rapper. Because I'm white AND asian, and I grew up with a computer instead of a boombox, that my friends coded and didn't rhyme. Not that I don't want to, or that I don't work at it, it's closed doors to me.
I'm fairly certain that black people from the neighbourhoods that I get my music from, walking into a coding interview, even if they've been trying to program for years, they'd be just as lost as me walking into a rap battle. It's not about how hard you work at it, or how hard you push at it. Social mobility takes commitment.
Or succinctly put from the same song "
What am I to do when every neighborhood is an obstacle"
"The only way out the ghetto, you know the stereotype Shooting hoops or live on the stereo like top 40".
That really makes me think. 20 years ago Biggie was saying "Either you're slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot." I guess being on Top 40 is an improvement.
This I really don't understand. All it takes is a simple Google search about "what can I expect in a software interview?" and you'll see right away the importance of whiteboard interviews for so many companies, especially when you are coming out of college. I don't how true the quote actually is, but for anyone, regardless of race, I feel like this is just basic due diligence if you want a job.
I've barely been to any career events at my school, and professors never mention about whiteboard interviews. My friends in CS don't discuss this either. I just learned right away when I did some basic research on job searching.
Your experience seems very weird to me. But I don't have enough data to know if it's atypical. I graduated not too long ago, but my school had many industry veterans as teachers, not pure academics, and sometimes they'd tell stories, one of which included formally proving to an interviewer during a whiteboard interview that the interviewer's expected answer was wrong. Besides that, the school (like I thought many colleges these days) put an emphasis on helping students get hired post-graduation. Additionally students themselves would practice whiteboarding each other, and I occasionally brought it up with friends in rants about how stupid the whiteboard hazing culture is.
Bad students or bad schools, it's really surprising either way they can be that bad.
Have you ever tried working at fast food joint in the summer?
You can work hard in the kitchen in KFC and push yourself to work even harder in the hot summer months, but that won't lead you to a better job. Students who work hard at school that does not prepare them for the current working environment, will not fair better either. Hard work and pushing yourself more does not always lead to success.
Is nobody willing to acknowledge the reality of genetically inherited IQ? It's like all of our political system is designed around subverting this reality. I suppose society that openly accepts this reality would lead to instability? Is that why we hide the truth, that in fact, yes your genetics do matter? Why do we know about how evolution works, but turn a blind eye to the fact that different pools of genetics have different inherent abilities?
EDIT: As a general statement (Please argue logically I am interested in the counterarguement):
Some how over thousands of years of almost complete separation, people managed to genetically grow different facial structures but stayed completely the same on the inside? So only physical characteristics are heritable? That's how evolution works?
The whole tenant of evolution is that great effective genes are passed on and reflected in offspring. By arguing that there is no genetic difference you are arguing that IQ cannot be passed on and that different environments did not select for and need different levels of IQ. If you are arguing that, then you are denying evolution as a theory.
You're being downvoted because you're being a racist buffoon. Yes, there is genetic variation across traits, this is a fact. That said, we are all heavily influenced by our environments and to discount this incredibly formative factor of all human life is ridiculous. Culture, poverty, exposure to crime, and endless cycle of poor parenting, whatever it may be - there are a million things that can and DO get in the way of someone succeeding far, far before their genetics.
Case in point right here. Somehow there is this big conspiracy where certain groups of people, unanimously across the world, across all of human time, do worse than other groups of people. The whole world is in on it, and we must fix it!
It doesn't require a conspiracy. Those in power accumulate more power and exploit those with less power. That's human nature. Much power comes from technical leverage, and that's largely a historical accident. Read Guns, Germs, and Steel (or watch the tv version). It gets to the root of how technology happened, and how it gave some cultures a leg up.
Here's a precis:
In the area of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (Iraq/Syria today), several species of grains grow natively - oats, barley, rye, etc. And several species of domesticatable large animals - sheep, horses, cattle - are also native. Very few animals can actually be domesticated.
Grains can be stored for a long time (years), but are hard to digest for humans. The accidental discovery of fermentation led to bread and beer. This gave the people living there a much more stable and high-quality food source than hunter-gathers. Improving the storage led to ceramics. Ceramics led to firing. Firing led to plaster, so they could also build much more durable structures. Experience with high heat fires led to smelting, alloying, and forging metal. The wealth these practices produced led to towns and then cities, and economic specialization - especially trained and well-equipped soldiers. Specialization led to writing, which created more wealth. Herding sheep and cattle, and riding horses, became practical and effective. The wealthy early kingdoms of the Middle East started conquering their neighbors and spreading their technologies.
Fast forward to the example of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the Incas. Pizarro had 160 or so men, with horses, swords, and guns. He completely destroyed a 5000 man Inca army. How? Technology. The Incas weren't stupid or weak, as you're suggesting. They were unprepared. The Incas didn't have horses or sophisticated metalworking - their environment didn't lead to those discoveries. The Spanish sword was the deadliest weapon in the world, the product of a couple thousand years of refinement. Their horses and mounted warfare techniques were the product of thousands of additional years of refinement. Europeans, of course, knew how to fight men on horseback. You build long spears and polearms, and train soldiers to stand their ground against the terrifying charge. The Incas didn't know that. They panicked, scattered, and were easily slaughtered.
They weren't stupid. They weren't weak. They were outgunned.
The Spaniards, of course, were smart as we are, by your concepts. Imagine what would happen if 160 fully armed armed modern soldiers, with the latest weapons, traveling in modern armored vehicles, encountered a 5000 man army of Spaniards with horses and swords?
It's all luck. It's all an accident of history. You're not either intellectually or morally superior to any other race.
Who are you talking about, Africa? The middle east? South-east Asia? Europe?
Well, since I'm German, let's take the eurocentric approach. When we were walking around in furs scalping Romans, Africa was going pretty strong, wasn't it. China was going strong. The middle east was a major power. At that point, you could feasibly say that the Germanic savages were unanimously across the world, across all human time (eg. the last 200 years), doing worse than other groups of people. We just did kinda well, hit or miss, over the last 1000 years, which across the timescales humanity has been existing, isn't that much.
Other areas haven't been as lucky. Native Americans (last 200 years), Africa (last 300 years), China (last 200 years), the Ottoman empire (last 100 years), Russia (last 100 years) but hell, Austria isn't as hot as it was 100 years ago. But China is bouncing back, Africa is bouncing back, India is bouncing back.
Blacks make up 13% of the population in the US but 75% of NBA players and 67% of NFL players.
Do you think white peoples under representation in US pro sports is more due to genetics or environmental influence?
Having worked in Sillycon Valley for a long time I think it's funny/sad how the whole scene pretends to be PC about race and diversity issues when pretty much all the tech employees there are white or Indian males.
What's even funnier is that white people are only a small percentage of world population but have the audacity to refer to all other races as 'minorities'.
I don't know any good solution to systemic race/diversity issues other than making mushrooms legal and mandatory.
Not to mention, African Americans play a lot of basketball because Americans in general play (or view) a lot of basketball.
In Europe, say, Africans play a lot of football. But there's also just as many whites who do- so are African Americans only endowed with the kind of genetics that help them play good basketball? Or are Africans in general endowed with good _basketball_ genetics, but not good _football_ genetics?
And what about European basketball? Why are basketball teams in Europe not predominantly African American?
[Where "football" read "soccer" if you're on the other side of the pond, please]
Surprise, there are actually more diverse sets of black people than "African", each with their own biological diversity. African-Americans (that is, blacks in America who can trace their ancestors to the southern slaves) overwhelming come from a specific part of Africa, and those Africans are quite different from Africans elsewhere on the continent. You even have race wars among different ethnic groups of Africans! (See Rwanda for a particularly gruesome example.) So some African subgroups are actually better at different athletic traits -- not all can jump like African-Americans, but then again not all can sprint like another group, or run for very long distances like yet another group -- just as not all White people are actually as intelligent on average as the British. Human biological diversity is pretty rich and varied, it's just unfortunate that the thing that matters most in modern society (intelligence) correlates as well as it does with such general and otherwise not very telling traits like skin color.
> What's even funnier is that white people are only a small percentage of world population but have the audacity to refer to all other races as 'minorities'.
I am fairly certain that is because they are often referring to other races in their own countries. If you live in the US, most of your news is about North America and Europe, both continents that are predominantly filled with white people.
A pretty large percentage of Americans would refer to a black person born and living in Africa (or any other continent besides the Americas) as African-American. So you may be giving them more credit than they deserve.
I would bet a large percentage of Americans couldn't identify their home state on a map of the world.
It's also telling that "genetically inherited IQ" always happens to appear in discussions about "race", as if our crude racial classifications represent semantically meaningful genetic variations as it relates to general intelligence.
Whatever role genetics play in IQ are most certainly not manifested in the concentration of melanin in one's skin or the coarseness of one's hair or the color of one's eyes or the size of one's nose or any of the other crude heuristics we use to group people up as "races".
Still, even with a racial component to genetic IQ, we know that "tech" is not some enlightened trade where only high IQ employees are considered, outside of the elite firms like Google, Apple etc you're going to find a glut of pretty average programmers and plenty of idiots to boot.
"Whatever role genetics play in IQ are most certainly not manifested in the concentration of melanin in one's skin or the coarseness of one's hair or the color of one's eyes or the size of one's nose or any of the other crude heuristics we use to group people up as "races"."
You are making the case that intraracial facial structures all resemble each other, but internally how people are connected (brain structure) does not follow the same pattern. Some how over thousands of years of almost complete seperation, people managed to genetically grow different facial strucutres but stayed completely the same on the inside? The whole tenant of evolution is that great effective genes are passed on and reflected in offspring. By arguing that there is no genetic difference you are arguing that IQ cannot be passed on and that different environments did not select for and need different levels of IQ. If you are arguing that, then you are denying evolution as a theory.
> You are making the case that intraracial facial structures all resemble each other
No, my point is precisely the opposite. I'm making the case that facial structures are a crude approximation for genetic classification because it's not true that all "black" people have a dark skin complexion, not all "black" people have thick kinky hair, there is genetic diversity within the "black" community because the definition of "black" is fluid and based on an amalgamation of regional, political, cultural and apparent (as in apparent to the naked eye) genetic factors.
With all due respect, for the purpose of what we are arguing here, this pisses me off. Why do I even waste my time trying to make an argument when you spew this.
HBD has been generally disregarded as bunk science. I have yet to see anything otherwise that isn't on some vaguely conspiratorial and mostly self-referential blog somewhere.
"Scientifically it has been proven ... It just isn't mainstream" - the presence of these words, in this precise sequential order, has been empirically demonstrated to indicate that the author is a crackpot.
The whole tenant of evolution is that great effective genes are passed on and reflected in offspring. By arguing that there is no genetic difference you are arguing that IQ cannot be passed on and that different environments did not select for and need different levels of IQ. If you are arguing that, then you are denying evolution as a theory.
There are peer reviewed papers you know, with replication and everything. It's regarded as bunk science by the exact same kinds of people who say climate change science is bunk science: people who don't read the science papers.
For such a controversial topic, you're being very cavalier. If you just butt-in with overconfident assertions and fail to cite any sources, you can expect to get downvoted for racism.
More importantly: Even if you're right, it can also be true that blacks and hispanics suffer from discrimination. Better to err on the side of helping the disadvantaged than to use an excuse like, "Eh, most of them aren't as smart as us."
Lastly, I prefer Gwern's response to the race & IQ debate.[1] The whole topic is radioactive. The best course of action is to stay silent. Eventually, gene sequencing will get cheaper and the data will be overwhelming (in support of one hypothesis or the other).
> Is nobody willing to acknowledge the reality of genetically inherited IQ?
What are you saying? are you really saying the lighter the skin the more "intelligent" one is? Ceteris paribus ? you know it's ridiculous and you know where this kind of "pseudo-scientific" ideology leads.
> Is that why we hide the truth,
What truth ? racism ? Ask yourself ,did you come to that conclusion after researching the topic or where you seeking arguments to fuel and rationalize your pre-existing bigotry ? Because with the same arguments you could make the same case to justify sexism or antisemitism. Yes for the nazis, the "vile" nature of the jews came from their genes.
It's actually a little embarrassing how much I know about the topic. I find evolution interesting. The more I study and understand, the more I am astounded by people's chosen ignorance on this topic. It's a harsh reality with far reaching consequences. But living as if it isnt true is just as harmful to our society. As things progress it will be increasingly hard to cover up and ignore. I am very curious what will happen at that point.
Sorry to further dogpile on your comment, but I just realised what it is that
bothers me with discussions of IQ and race: it's that IQ is a proxy. It's a
stand-in for something we can't directly observe and therefore cannot measure,
or even fully define.
Which means, it's _very_ difficult to see how "IQ" itself would be an inherited
trait, seeing as it's not a trait at all. It's not even a thing at all. All that
IQ is, entirely literally, is a score on some test that some people have taken.
I mean, I hope it's obvious how it's completely ridiculous to believe that you
can pass on your score at a test to your offspring, right?
Will no one actually argue the topic at hand? Are you really taking time out of your day to post this!? Iq is a proxy for intelligence, it's not perfect, but it is a massive predictor for success in life. The largest predictor in fact. But even if that wasn't the case, you know I'm referring to intelligence. So why are you posting this? Is this really the most intelligent thing you can think of?
I'm arguing the point, yes. I'm saying that IQ is an arbitrary measure and who
knows what it's measuring. Others have pointed out that race is also an
arbitrary category and that skin colour is not necessarily the same thing as
having the same genetics.
So basically we have an arbitrary measure correlated with another arbitrary
measure. We don't have much to draw firm conclusions on.
And that agrees with the other thing you bring up:
>> "Iq .. is a massive predictor for success in life."
That may just as well be an outcome of racial bias against non-whites in the US.
In which case, IQ would be a pretty accurate measure of racial bias, but not of
intelligence.
You're asking "so why do blacks score lower in IQ tests?". I'm answering: who
knows why. The fact that they do means the test is probably broken, not that
they're less intelligent for real.
Basically, any test result that just so happens to agree with some widely held
societal belief should set the bias alarm off.
>> So only physical characteristics are heritable?
See my point above - physical characteristics are directly observable, and therefore, measurable. Mental, emotional etc psychological characteristics are not directly observable, so are only measurable through a proxy.
In the case of intelligence, the proxy is an IQ test and we don't even have a good definition of what it is we're proxying, so it might not even be a single characteristic, but rather the combination of many traits.
So yeah, we can say very safely that you can get your eyes or your height from your parents, but not so about your IQ.
Corollary, maybe you can inherit your _intelligence_ but since we don't have a good definition of that and no way to measure it directly, there's no solid ground to stand on arguing that this or that "race" has more or less of it. And the same goes for any other group, really.
Full disclosure: I'm interested in this discussion too, mostly because I believe the whole idea of IQ measurements is bogus to begin with.
The study of IQ (and the underlying g) is one of two or three (definitely less than 6) crown jewels of psychology. You should probably read the actual science, "we" know quite a bit about intelligence. (I can help get you started if you're really interested, but I suspect you aren't.)
Thank you, I am indeed interested and I do read the actual science as you
suggest. I study artificial intelligence so I'm in a position to know that
there is no universally accepted definition of intelligence, certainly not a
formal one that would allow us to encode it in a program and so reproduce
intelligence in a machine.
There is very little disagreement on that in the field of AI. In fact, there is
so much agreement that we have no idea what intelligence is, that we've totally
given up on trying to understand it and instead switched to hoping that
intelligence will naturally arise if we create complex enough systems (complex
enough that we also don't understand them very well).
All that said, you're welcome to point me to the studies that are relevant to
your field and I will gladly go through them, although I can't guarantee that I
have the time to do so on time to continue this debate in this thread.
Well, if you're looking for understanding that's good enough we can program it, then yeah, we don't understand it. Also I think there was a misunderstanding on my part, in that we know quite a bit about human intelligence (that is, g), but not so much about intelligence-in-general. I'd rather clear up any miscommunication before throwing citations at you -- is your disagreement that g is not a well-established thing which maps very well to any tests of general intelligence you can conceive, or that g is a useless predictor, or that intelligence as measured by g is non-hereditary, or that g isn't useful because it's not a specific module of the brain we can simulate in code or hot-swap with that part of a donor's brain?
People may still quibble, but I was under the impression the standard acceptable definition for intelligence (at least among AI folks) is Legg and Hutter's informal "the ability to efficiently achieve goals in a wide range of domains". (Which has been formalized with AIXI.) I'm also aware of several groups in the AI field who believe they can actually construct a mind, in fact that this is the safest way forward, and that hoping it just "emerges" is folly as old as the first neural net proponents...
In case it's worth it to you, either when you return with your new account after this one is inevitably blowtorched off the site, or on next week's spelling test, the word you're looking for is "tenet" (a principle or belief), not "tenant" (a rental resident).
Everyone else reading this can find the flag button quickly by clicking on the timestamp next to the name on the comment.
I'm not a troll, I believe this. I'm actually baffled that people can't see how obvious it is. I'm highly credentialed/successful in the tech industry. In the case that I have no intelligence what so ever, explain this comment you have linked. To me, he's pointing out some obscure fact, that not all Africans look the same. Fine, but 95%+ do, can we argue about the general concept? Or do I have to be confined to spelling and grammar mistake arguments? Along with nitpicking? Personal insults?
It pains me greatly that the tech industry lacks diversity from minorities like blacks, hispanics, and women. However, I strongly believe that looking at the tech companies and asking why they don't hire more minorities is totally missing the real problem.
This is of course one datapoint, but the university I went to (top engineering school in the Northeast US) hosts a big panel for computer-field majors at the annual admissions event. Any students remotely interested in technical majors are invited to attend - you don't even need to be accepted to the university. The marketing for the event makes it as clear as possible that no prior programming experience is required, they just want to get people excited about computing. When I served on the panel as a CS student, I looked out the audience and saw a fully packed room (300+ people) of almost entirely white/Asian male prospective students and their parents. At that point, how do you recover and get diverse people? How do you get people interested when everyone showing up fits the same description?
In my view, the problem starts way before college/job seeking. I was lucky, as a white male, that my parents noticed and encouraged my technical interests at an early age. By the time I was entering college, I had years of programming experience, not even at any company, but just working on my laptop in my bedroom. It kills me that so many minorities and women never even get that opportunity. Parents of young girls don't seem to see/nurture those interests, and sometimes actively encourage them not to go into technology. It makes perfect sense that later they're not interested in pursuing college/careers in computers.
I have worked at companies where the people doing hiring have literally whispered (since it is illegal to say so) that they are desperate to hire minorities and women. I once heard someone say, "Man, I would love to hire this person, but I have to be fair, and if they were male I would have rejected them immediately".
Yes, tech companies need to be as accepting as possible towards minorities and women. Yes, minorities and women need role models in the industry. But we've got to start at the source at the problem and get parents to allow their children to be interested in computers in the first place!
I agree. Speaking from my own experience, I didn't even really understand what computer science was until I was in college (I'm female and from a small town). I had taken a "make your own website" summer class in grade school where we did some super basic HTML but that was it. Why would I choose computer science as a major when I was never really exposed to it and didn't even know what it entailed? I'm now starting to learn python on my own and I think computer science could have been a really good fit for me. I think encouraging kids is a great first step.
The sentiment is sometimes expressed as "The pipeline is leaky and full of acid." While true, it doesn't imply that companies should just sit on their hands and wait for the system to be fixed around them. Companies are the core of the power structure economically; they need to be taking an active role in fixing their pipelines.
Uh, what? Tech companies aren't obviously the correct place to be applying leverage. They could already be hiring more women and minorities than you'd expect given STEM interest levels in high school. If the fundamental problem is that something is happening to people before graduating high school, I'd take a much more critical look at schooling, child-rearing, and cultural factors.
Schooling is particularly worrying - it's got a troubling focus on instilling conformity, and AFAIK that's both more effective on women and particularly damaging to creative work like computer programming.
I think you're misunderstanding: I'm not talking about tech companies changing their hiring goals. I'm talking about tech companies reaching out to schools (college, high school, middle school level) to get a sense of what they need and to help them give students the opportunities to pursue computer science and other technological careers based on their interest.
There's a knowledge and understanding gap on both sides---both in terms of what companies understand about how students are prepared and what schools understand about what skillsets students need to excel in technology fields. It turns out outreach and active participation can be valuable to bridge that gap.
>I'm talking about tech companies reaching out to schools (college, high school, middle school level) to get a sense of what they need and to help them give students the opportunities to pursue computer science and other technological careers based on their interest.
And if you want that to happen, you need to set up incentives such that it's in tech companies best interests to do so. You can't just say that things would be better if something were to happen - identifying problems is the easy part. Identifying what needs to change and how to change it is the hard part.
One idea might be to identify majority-black and majority-hispanic schools who don't have a computer science program and and establish a fund which can either pay the schools directly to establish them or set up well-advertised after-school programs to try to fill the gap.
Why does it pain you greatly? Does it do the same for other professions like nursing?
My entryway into computers was "I want to build a website like this one, but better." This same opportunity exists for everyone with a web browser, which is most everyone. You had the additional fortune of parents seeking out opportunities for you, but it was not necessary, and I suspect you'd have found your way to tech eventually even with no external support.
Maybe it's painful because you want more diversity in your life? Why not fulfill that desire outside of work? Maybe it's painful to work on legacy stuff that you're sure with a more diverse mindset wouldn't be so crufty? I think we've come impressively far with the current (and in the past "worse") state of affairs, clearly we don't need the diversity to accomplish greatness. I'm on a team with Indians, Koreans, Chinese...and two other white guys. Our manager is black. Our manager's manager is a woman. I don't think this diversity gives us any technical advantage, but since we're all competent, there's not really any disadvantage, this is just how the dice fell for us. The only way this diversity impacts me is that my name gets mispronounced (and vice versa for some of them). But as you mention there are a lot of diversity advocates who want diversity over merit for some mysterious reason and will actively sabotage teams to get it.
I think the article mixes non-tech hiring problems with tech problems. I think tech is one of the only fields where your skin color really does not matter. We hire people from far-flung countries who can barely communicate in english; we hire 17-year-olds who have not even finished highschool; we hire total misfits; etc., based solely on their technical expertise. So it bothers me to read crap like this:
Research has found that during hiring, managers are biased against black-sounding names on résumés, for instance, and interviewers weigh too heavily whether they’d want to hang out with someone.
This may happen in other jobs, but in my 20 years in tech, I have never seen this. Go to any good tech company, and see the odd folks walking about. And yet they'll have an issue with black or hispanic folks? I doubt it.
Network does play a role, I will agree. But what plays a bigger role is your technical chops; and it is very easy today to demonstrate your skills via SO or Github.
> This may happen in other jobs, but in my 20 years in tech, I have never seen this.
It's typically called "culture fit".
EDIT: Not all culture fit is bad, I think it's important that people can work together. But it can easily disguise any number of subjective biases, many of which you may not be aware.
Where "culture" really means class. Lower class culture vs upper class culture. Poor people make non-poor people very uncomfortable. The bar scene in Good Will Hunting is such a good example.
I don't necessarily agree with this. There are a number of polarizing factors—ethnicity, religion, politics, age, having a family. Class is only one way to get filtered out.
I think a better response might be to say, depending on how strongly you evaluate the evidence, "Gee, my personal opinion about this might need to be revised or given less weight in light of broader trends and evidence."
For example, bias against black-sounding names is a real thing. It doesn't really matter if you personally have seen it, or if you think you haven't seen it. It's still real and quantifiable.
Most of us should continue to be skeptical that statistical analyses about these things must be carried out robustly and stand up to statistical grokking ... but conditional on that, believe the data and not your gut.
Without considering where the data came from, under what assumptions was it collected, when was it collected, etc. how can you blindly lay faith in some "data"? I have some data which says N horses died on the streets of San Francisco last year; will you believe it? It just so happens that "last year" was 1895. Doesn't that make the "data" useless?
Show me any other major industrial sector where a 17-year-old can start a company and be bought out for $30MM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D'Aloisio#Summly
Show me where highschool dropouts can make more than Harvard MBAs.
Yes, tech has problems with gender or ageism; but skin color is hardly ever an issue. In fact, if it is, it is in the other direction. I had a friend who graduated from a top CS school and couldn't get a faculty position. The Chair at one department actually told him: if you were a woman or minority, I'd hire you right away.
BTW: I'm not implying that everything is great. But compared to other sectors, tech is actually a pretty decent place to be if you don't "fit in" into the convention.
I said conditional upon the data passing statistical grokking, then believe the data and not your gut. I should have made this conditionality more clear.
I didn't say blindly believe the data or blindly believe your gut.
But many people use their anecdotal experiences as justification to deny clearly significant trends because they personally "never observed it."
> Show me any other major industrial sector where a 17-year-old can start a company and be bought out for $30MM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D'Aloisio#Summly Show me where highschool dropouts can make more than Harvard MBAs.
In a lot of ways these are not good things about our field. They represent a lot of the ways that toxic culture and a flight from quality are pervasive in tech. In tech, it's rarely about actually adding value and often much more about extracting rents from marketing and status. Just like it is in tons of other fields.
Tech is not like this because tech is more meritocratic. Tech is absolutely not meritocratic.
> but skin color is hardly ever an issue.
What are you basing this on? As far as I can tell, only your vague assessment of your personal observations. OK. That's not nothing. But because a lot of people present compelling arguments that it is an issue, I'm generally not just going to take some anecdotal reasoning. There are other explanations. Maybe you've been around racial bias and just not noticed it. Or maybe you've been extremely lucky to avoid being near it. Either of those are more plausible that the unlikely case that your anecdotal experience just happens to be more representative than all of the principled studies (which yes, always have flaws, but no that's not a good reason to believe their basic premise is entirely wrong).
> This may happen in other jobs, but in my 20 years in tech, I have never seen this.
I've been in Tech about 25 to 30 years. I'm sad to report that I have seen it happen a time or two in tech. But what I will say... is that before I went into "pure" tech, it happened in other fields in a much more overt manner.
I was a peon at DDB Needham in Chicago a long time ago and was talking to a friend of mine when one of the VP's came into her cube. The VP wanted her to go through the resumes and circular file all of the ones who were black. My friend asked how would she know if they were black... the woman said "Oh... you'll know. Look at the names."
As it happened some other friends of mine were talking about starting a company using this really cool thing called "WinSock" to do networking. So I went home that night and joined them. I'd had enough of the BigCo lifestyle. Two really good exits later ... here I am. So I really ought to thank that VP lady.
I ran into that attitude a couple of times in tech over the 25 or so years since then... but not NEARLY as often as when I was doing the BigCo thing. It does happen though. And I tended to run away from those people as fast and as far as I could.
Interesting how many people here think that the problem rests solely with Black/Hispanic students. I am a black software engineer. As I see it, there are systemic problems, as you can imagine. But one reason that may be missed here is that sometimes people get weary of being the "only black person in the room". So some of the students may be opting out simply because they want a more diverse workplace, and tech is very very white. Just take a look at this thread, in which we have jimmywagner asserting that Black and Latino people are liabilities, and michaelbuddy asserting that systemic issues are "ghosts". They are of course entitled to their opinions (however much I may disagree with them), but honestly that type of hostility masked as objectivity gets old really quick.
I can expand later if anyone is interested in a real conversation.
Sure tech is generally non-black, but there are load of East Asians and South Asians. It's not exactly the Augusta National Golf Club.
There are a lot of places in corporate information technology in the US where tech is "very very" Indian and a white or black or hispanic person may very well be the only non-Indian (or even US citizen or permanent resident) in the room or on the team.
Agreed. Even in a metro with very low Asian population, we have a lot of Asian workers in my I.T. department and it seems to be the case for other companies nearby. Probably we are about 65% non-Hispanic white (including eastern europeans and foreign workers in that number), 30% Asian (about half Asian and half east Asian, with a few southeast Asians), 5% black and Hispanic.
You are correct. My current place of employment is very Indian. In many ways, however, there is less tension in those situations. Often times whites tend to treat non whites in a certain manner that is less than... Now, I am not trying to paint all whites in tech with a broad brush (even if I sounds very much like I am). White people are cool with me, and if I'm to be honest, I have more white friends right now than I do black. So please, understand I am not trying to say "All white people...". I'm not angry. I am instead giving an honest assessment of my experience in tech for the last 15 years, and how it may relate to this story.
It does vary quite a bit. I've found that the startup scene in SF is extremely white comparatively to the enterprise software company that I work for in SF.
The point still stands though if you replace the word "white" with "non-black / hispanic". There are vast cultural and systemic barriers that some minorities go through in the United States (black / latino) to get to becoming a software engineer, and not others (Asian).
Not long ago there was a report that came out on the quality of work of women software engineers. Turns out it was significantly higher than for the average male software enginee. This is actually not a good thing, and many people came to the wrong conclusions about it. My reading is that women aren't being hired in software unless they can prove themselves to a higher standard than men. I suspect the same is true for lots of other groups (like blacks and hispanics).
There remains pernicious and not widely appreciated systemic bias in this industry, and until it's even acknowledged we're not going to have much luck in tackling it.
That report was simply not true. If anything, it showed there was no bias based on sex. In addition to MollyR's links, see Slate Star Codex's Before You Get Too Excited About that GitHub Study.[1]
Edit: If my comment seems unnecessary, it's because MollyR edited-in a link to the Slate Star Codex post before I finished mine. I'm glad I'm not the only one who's read SSC's rebuttal.
I see it as a reasonable continuation of college and professional experience that becomes a problem for both sides when the issue is simply "diversity" without asking deeper questions as to why.
If a college has a large white population, most white people will be friends with mostly white people. Maybe a few start a company. They refer to their networks for early employees. Those networks are mostly white. The early employees become managers and hire primarily through the same channels, perpetuating the imbalance (as defined by having vastly unequal representation compared to the general population).
I have trouble prescribing solutions to diversity imbalances because it is hard to say where and when the imbalance is a problem. The only thing I can imagine that would be helpful is to have more people of different backgrounds engage each other on each other's turf. Make friends. Maybe start a business. Let the networks expand from day one. Otherwise, you're always playing catch-up.
As an aside, I attended RIT, which, aside from being overwhelmingly white, contains the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which has an awe-inspiring diversity in its student body. That proximity taught me a lot about deaf and hard-of-hearing culture, which, because of the aforementioned incredible racial diversity, taught me a lot about lives other than my own as well.
I can't begin to understand how it is an issue, and I'm black (and European). I don't care about the color or the sex of my coworkers. What difference does it make? you can't relate to white people? No the main issue is networking and going out of one's own "sphere" or microcosm.
> So some of the students may be opting out simply because they want a more diverse workplace
If they really like programming then they should worry about programming first and foremost, not how diverse is their environment. But maybe it's because of my upbringing, when I was the only black in a class of 30 students, I didn't have the time or any interest in worrying about the "blackness" of the classroom. I didn't have the time to worry about my tastes being "black" or white or whatever.
Do some people have it easier because they are white ? Sure, people trust their kin more, and you talking about being "only black person in the room" is in my opinion the expression of that fact. What is true for white people is also true for black people, it's human nature.
> I can't begin to understand how it is an issue, and I'm black (and European). I don't care about the color or the sex of my coworkers. What difference does it make? you can't relate to white people? No the main issue is networking and going out of one's own "sphere" or microcosm.
Read my comment later, where I mentioned that I have more white friends than black friends. I have no problem with white people. And no, I don't care about the color or sex of my coworkers. Instead, I was describing a very real phenomenom which may have been overlooked in the article.
> If they really like programming then they should worry about programming first and foremost, not how diverse is their environment. But maybe it's because of my upbringing, when I was the only black in a class of 30 students, I didn't have the time or any interest in worrying about the "blackness" of the classroom. I didn't have the time to worry about my tastes being "black" or white or whatever.
Not sure if you or I should say what those students should be worrying about. I think you may be missing my point. I made no mention about what those students should do. Instead, I talked about what they may be doing.
> Sure, people trust their kin more, and you talking about being "only black person in the room" is in my opinion the expression of that fact.
Actually that came from my personal experience (and that of many other POC) of trusting people who are not my kin, and then having race be brought up in a way that was detrimental to me.
First, I must say, whoever is downvoting you it's not me.
> Instead, I was describing a very real phenomenom which may have been overlooked in the article.
Ok, I understand and I agree with you then.
> Not sure if you or I should say what those students should be worrying about. I think you may be missing my point. I made no mention about what those students should do. Instead, I talked about what they may be doing.
Agreed.
> Actually that came from my personal experience (and that of many other POC) of trusting people who are not my kin, and then having race be brought up in a way that was detrimental to me.
You know it happened to me too and no need to say that in Europe people are less PC than in US. That's of course unacceptable and every time it happened I fought it. It's often more ignorance than ideology, i.e. casual racism. What I'm seriously worried about is all that "reverse racism" that is also becoming casual in US. It doesn't build trust between cultures/minorities, It's just making things worse in my opinion.
@kamau - imagine how it was for the first indian or chinese in an totally white male company? how was it for when women started entering the workforce in the 60s/70s? Unfortunately such despicable racist attitudes are prevalent, perhaps widely.
But I would argue tech is a meritocracy - not perfect - but very much a meritocracy.
I don't have to imagine. I've been the first or only Black person in more than one company. I'm already the change I want. I'm just waiting for the rest of y'all (not necessarily you) to catch up.
Then you should know better than computing black:white ratios. How's that an issue? I too am a racial minority in my team and my color has never has been an issue. It becomes an issue if you consciously make it one (as you did ITT)
Good for you. I mean that sincerely. I've personally had my color be an issue at 2 different jobs. I left those jobs. The reason that I mention ratios is that I think that people (all people) behave better in more diverse environments. And that sometimes when ratios are skewed one way or another, those in the majority can be a bit tone deaf to others. Just an observation of human nature. If you think race is too hot of an issue, or one that you think could never be a possibility, imagine another line : gender, class, income, neighborhood, etc. I'm sure that eventually you'll see what I mean.
"I too am a racial minority on my team" could mean white guy with a bunch of Asians. I'm sorry but that's not nearly the same thing as other scenarios in the US.
And plenty people of color put on race blinders or never encounter any issues, but that doesn't mean hostile environments do not exist. In my personal experience, it varies wildly from city to city and company to company. I've worked at companies that celebrate black history month and companies where white managers think it's fun to touch black women's hair.
Well put. Thanks for posting valuable comments instead of responding in kind—it greatly improved this thread.
It takes longer for reflective and informative comments to show up than it does for reflexive ones, but they do eventually. It takes time to think and write something good. And often a thoughtful comment only gets posted because someone feels compelled to reply to a glib one. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184489.
Why is it the responsibility of the companies to fix this? In the same way that it seems perverse that Apple is the one standing up to the USG on privacy, why do companies bear the moral responsibility for fixing social ills?
The only way a company should be responsible for hiring underrepresented minorities is if there was a market inefficiency to be exploited. And even then, that's a responsibility to their shareholders, not to society. And "we hire black people because we don't have to pay them as much" probably wouldn't go over too well, anyway.
Companies don't bear any moral responsibilities - people do
Hiring managers and executives should use all of the tools at their disposal in the context of recruitment and hiring - including moral and ethical judgement.
Setting moral responsibilities aside - if you want to hire talented, passionate engineers like me, you will get serious about building teams with people from diverse backgrounds.
>if you want to hire talented, passionate engineers like me, you will get serious about building teams with people from diverse backgrounds.
There's a pretty major leap in logic, there. What does diversity have to do with talented, passionate engineering teams? Companies like Honda and Toyota have some of the least diverse engineering teams on the planet, and yet they have a well-earned reputation for engineering excellence.
You may want a company to take diversity seriously, and there are many others who feel the same way. But it doesn't follow that maximizing diversity is therefor an imperative for companies that want to have world-class teams. In fact diversity seems to be orthogonal to competence.
I'll rephrase that - if you want to hire ME, you need to take this stuff seriously.
I wasn't delving into the merits of diversity - I believe in it; I'm seeing it put to the test every day at my company, and I like what I see.
> it doesn't follow that maximizing diversity is therefor an imperative for companies that want to have world-class teams.
Diversity isn't about addition/subtraction, nor is it calculus; it's not even sociology, macroeconomics, or socioeconomics.
Diversity is about adaptive systems.
> In fact diversity seems to be orthogonal to competence.
I'll concede this point, but only with the substitution of "productivity" for "competence". Homogenous teams can outperform diverse teams, IN THE SHORT TERM.
Diversity may lead directly to inefficiency and conflict. In the short term, these are painful inhibitors to productivity.
In the long term, diversity of backgrounds, capabilities and perspectives - properly aligned - can be a huge asset.
If you are building a new company, and you want to beat the world, you'd be foolish to hire a bunch of people who think about things the same way that you do.
>> why do companies bear the moral responsibility for fixing social ills?
Er, because they're part of society?
And because in the case of giants of the corporate world, like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, they actually do have the wherewithal to influence that society to a degree that even governments often don't?
They also have the wherewithal to solve homelessness. Is that also their responsibility?
Corporations are, like Westphalian nation-states, explicitly amoral entities. The extent to which they behave morally is due to market and/or political pressure, not any inherent moral judgement.
Apple makes consumer devices. That's their business. They have a responsibility to make the greatest possible profit selling those devices. That's where their responsibility begins and ends.
Now, there are all sorts of moral dimensions that can affect their decisions. If their phones were made with slave labour, people might not buy them and talent might not want to work for them. But the reason Apple doesn't employ slave labour isn't because it is a moral entity; it isn't. Apple doesn't employ slave labour because doing so would hurt its bottom line.
If you want companies to behave in an ethical fashion, you need to align legal, social, market, tax, and other incentives in order to push them in that direction. Expecting them to do so out of the goodness of their hearts is quixotic: they have no hearts with which to be good.
>> If you want companies to behave in an ethical fashion, you need to align legal, social, market, tax, and other incentives in order to push them in that direction. Expecting them to do so out of the goodness of their hearts is quixotic: they have no hearts with which to be good.
You mean, if I want the big companies to do good (or "not do evil") I have to
pay up to them?
But the people who make up those big companies also have to live in the same
society as everyone else. So they should already have an incentive to do good
to those societies- they will personally benefit from that good-doing. Why do
they need me, or anyone else, to provide that incentive?
We all live in the same world, we all have a responsibility to be morally
considerate in it. "Companies" are not "amoral entities", neither are nations.
Because they are groups of lots of people, who all are subject to moral
judgement.
"I was just following orders" is not an excuse anymore, and neither should "I
was just doing my job" be.
>You mean, if I want the big companies to do good (or "not do evil") I have to pay up to them?
It means you need to align incentives. Those can be positive (tax breaks for hiring veterans) or negative (penalties for violating antitrust laws), but they are incentives nonetheless.
>So they should already have an incentive to do good to those societies- they will personally benefit from that good-doing.
Do you, individually, benefit more from living in a society where mining companies don't dump toxic chemicals in rivers in third world countries, or from making your quarterly bonuses? This is a classic tragedy of the commons.
>Why do they need me, or anyone else, to provide that incentive?
Because companies are amoral profit-maximization constructs.
>"Companies" are not "amoral entities", neither are nations.
There are many corporations and politicians who are more than happy to indulge that fantasy in exchange for your money or vote.
You can rant and rave about evil corporations till you're blue in the face, and you won't change a damned thing. Corporations respond to incentives, not moral pleas. Change the incentives if you want to change the behaviour.
It's times like these when I think to myself why I'm bothering to enter this field? I mean, I really wanna go into the tech feel to make awesome stuff, but hearing how hard it is for people who look like me (black African college student in the mid west) just gets me down.
Then again, software engineering has only been a thing for about 40-50 odd years and is young as compared to other professions, so I guess things will change.
Serious question: Do you want to go to Africa, where there are a lot more people who look like you? Or do you want to stay in the States, where there are (unfortunately) a number of people who are overtly racist, and a larger number who are more unconsciously assuming that it's a white person's world? I can't speak for you, but I suspect your answer is that there's enough good in the States that it's worth staying, problems and all.
Tech is like that. There are jerks, and there are racists, and there are abusive personalities. There are real, definite problems. It's still closer to a meritocracy than almost anywhere else. It's good enough that (to me) it's worth going into, problems and all. (Any individual situation may become toxic enough that you need to leave. But overall, I don't think it's bad enough to avoid, especially if that's where you would like to be.)
Various groups had faced real discrimination in the job market - jews, italians, irish, etc. Here's one piece of historical trivia - Warren Buffett could not get his first Wall Street job because the company he really wanted to work for had a policy of only hiring Jews - because all other Wall Street banks would not.
Ie industries had real 'no X allowed' policies in place - not this 'Oh, I don't feel like being the only black guy in the room'. Well too bad for you - the job will pay money to someone else who doesn't necessarily have to be around people like them.
Today whites, Asians and Indians are supposed to feel bad because other ethnicities don't make sufficient effort to join the industry? I'm sorry, I don't.
> "Reverse racism" is not a real thing. I swear people invent ways to feel persecuted
Reverse racism is certainly a real thing. Bigotry against white people is certainly a real thing. Go spend 5 minutes on salon.com, come back and tell me with a straight face that these people don't flirt with racism against white people.
As a black person, this kind of ideology isn't helping me. It's only helping pundits selling outrage.
Racism against whites exists, but labelling it reverse racism is asinine. Are white people such special snowflakes that discrimination against them needs an unique name? It's as dumb as the term reverse sexism.
Claiming Salon advocates for racism against whites promotes outrage. People are too sensitive.
Comments about pet peeve phrases tend to be low quality and off topic, but if you had offered an insight instead of a snarky dismissal, that would have been better. Also, ideological buzz-language like "are white people such special snowflakes" never does any good, regardless of what position you favor.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadThe problem is systemic from pre-school to the career fair. I believe it will change. But no one lever will do the full trick.
Or the kind of systemic that ensures their school districts are poorer and underfunded.
Or the kind of systemic that ensures you take the middle of the road when a black guy in a hoodie walks towards you in the same sidewalk.
Sure there aren't signs designating black and white water fountains but just because something is not written on a sign or on the law books doesn't mean its not written in the consciousness of the people.
The biggest reason for this in my opinion is the historical obfuscation.
Sure, we kind of studied the Civil Rights movement but we never really learned about Dr. King's deeper message, only that he "had a dream", and then segregation ended and everything was "normal" after that.
It wasn't until years after graduating that I began reading Dr. King's speeches that and the underlying causes of the racial divisions finally made sense, allowing me to let go of the anger I had held from bad experiences related to the racial animosity.
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...
Because I don't know a single person who is in the field of IT whose parents were in IT. Positions barely existed until the 90s.
No one has yet explained why even segregation today in some part of the country is affecting ethnic groups NOT interested or apt in coding to the level of getting the jobs.
Those kids didn't develop in vitro in some abstract new environment.
They had parents, grandparents, neighborhoods, school districts, schools, family fortune (or lack thereof) potential employers (themselves born in the 60' 60's and 80s) etc.
Anybody who thinks those things don't affect the nurture, career and prospects of a young person, or that those things change in a few decades, are deluded.
Usually the same people also fail to understand the notion of statistics, and think that outliers that beat the odds and rose to become successful entrepreneurs or whatever from such upbringings translate to "it's equally easy for whites and blacks to become successful, here, this kid proved it, but most blacks are just lazy".
In other words people who don't understand that most white people play life in easy mode, where most blacks do not -- and point to some "hard mode" winners as if that means everything is equally easy for everybody.
http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
Now if you can refute the source, I think that's great because I have a hard time believing it myself given the common narrative. One argument might be that somehow the amounts of money given somehow are squandered other ways, but that doesn't discount the amount given, it would point to the system where it's squandered not the funding itself.
The source is meaningless. Visit some schools in typical white districts and in typical black districts and compare them.
It's easy to have to spend more public money for poor districts since there's much more infrastructure work to be done, plus the students parents don't have enough to spend on their kids education in the first place.
It was the general "use" I used (e.g. the phrase could be read "that ensure one takes the middle of the road"). So, even if not you, then hell of a lot of people. Did you think that people who act in that "certain way" are unique snowflakes, and that their behavior is a personal curiosity that doesn't have historical roots and cultural influences?
>Like I said before, you're throwing out ghosts that you can't fight against specifically, to reinforce a claim of what causes entire ethnicities to have interest and aptitude in coding and IT work.
Well, I like some Lynard Skynard myself, but I wouldn't take it that far...
Having gotten my ass kicked intellectually repeatedly by black and hispanic students: no, those backgrounds are not a liability.
The two are not mutually exclusive. I would argue that a very significant part of the problem that Blacks and Hispanics face (besides simple discrimination on the part of people in positions of power -- which is very real, as studies of responses to applications in various context from people with stereotypically Black or Hispanic names vs. otherwise identical applications without that feature) is attitudes toward societal institutions and mainstream culture in their respective subcultures that are a direct product of problems in the broader society (including the schooling system), both currently and over the past several centuries (the longer time especially for black subculture) including, over much of that time, overt de jure subjugation and exclusion (which while it didn't directly impact young people today, is recent enough that lots of them have living relatives who did directly experience it) followed by covert (but still present, see earlier comment about applications) discrimination and neglect.
Arguing over whether A or B is the problem is pointless when A causes B which then contributes back to A.
Black and hispanic students benefit from preferential admissions standards to medical, law, business and other graduate schools that can lead to higher salaries and higher social standing than computer programming.
Consider the extreme case of black students and medical school:
Black students who are competitive candidates for software engineering at top tech companies could (probably all) choose to study medicine and, very possibly, be admitted to specialist residency programs.
Average specialist pay is $284,000. Average primary care pay is $195,000.
I'm a white high school dropout, but I got a developer position at age 27 after rushing through a CS degree later in live which took about ~3 years. I work 40 hours a week and get a very livable $100k+ salary plus stock and benefits with negligible student debt all things considered (~$30k).
My point being, in a vacuum, getting on track to making a good wage as a developer has a lot fewer barriers with the lack of medical school and debt. Not to mention the free time I have outside of work and regular hours. Salary isn't everything.
I cannot speak for people of color and their experience who want to go through the same process as me. There are all kinds of barriers they experience that I don't. Neil DeGrasse Tyson (I know, I know...) had a good answer to the silly question "What's with chicks in science?", and the cultural / systemic barriers he had to go through to reach that point in life [1].
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7ihNLEDiuM
Edit: there are literally medical gigs available where you can sleep all night and get paid $100 / hour while sleeping (specialty surgical hospitals, where many nights there may not be a patient overnight, but they require an md on site). Many emergency rooms in rural areas may not see 2 patients at night, but need an er doctor on site.
Of course, this is against the narrative, just as is pointing out that lots of people one generation away from medieval levels of poverty in Asia seem to be doing better than USA blacks.
At any rate, if a lack of diversity is prima facie racism, then here's a scoop:
http://www.nytco.com/board-of-directors/
How could any programmer worth his/her salt would not know about a whiteboard interview? I think that statement encapsulates it. No only are the schools they are graduating from are woefully inadequate, and they are entering a highly competitive field that with a fast changing landscape that is overwhelming for such grossly underprepared grads.
Ask yourself how come Asians & Jews do so well? They just work harder and push themselves more. I am as bleeding heart a liberal as they come and it pains me to see the lack of diversity, but culture has a huge part to play in it.
Wait, is it that or are the schools "woefully inadequate"??
>No only are the schools they are graduating from are woefully inadequate,
A lot of schools don't teach anything about interviewing. Its not academic. In fact, a lot of the training videos used in schools that do teach "job skills" to prepare students make no mention of white board interviews. They talk about being polite, wearing a suit, grooming, etc.
Judging an academic program on if they have ever been exposed to a whiteboard interview is fairly silly. I never saw on in 20 years.
As to your last paragraph, I'm not sure what role culture would play in introducing people to whiteboard interviews. I guess I grew up in a different environment, but I don't remember any of my urban white friends extolling the annual whiteboard festival. I can see it being a economic function of better schooling though.
Yikes, that's even worse. Some cultures will actively hold a suit against a candidate. I can't say I agree with that, but it's a little scary that they're giving stock advice to a highly dynamic field, very little of which is relevant. (Polite is good, being relaxed is better. Being suited is good, being comfortable is better.)
Well, stock advise is basically what text book publishers do.
Agreed, this is an indication of toxic culture on both sides.
HOWEVER. I would say aside from the grooming bit, the whiteboarding advice is the best possible advice for anyone. My mother can happily tell me to wear a suit, but she's not in a position to educate me about my field. A school had better fucking be, or what is the point? The technical knowledge—if they teach it at all—is itself is easier gained online than from a school.
Most places I've been wouldn't hold this against a new grad.
However, some places might hold this against a more senior person as being tone deaf toward the position he's going to be in. Nevertheless, I might wear a suit if the CEO, CTO, etc. was going to be part of my interview loop. But, I'll probably ditch the jacket and tie for the VP of Engineering.
I failed it miserably. Honestly, the experience left me kind of embarrassed and metaphorically beaten up for a while. Kind of like I'd claimed to be a programmer and had been revealed to be a fraud.
By this point (almost 20 years later), I've been through this wringer so many times that it seems like common knowledge. It doesn't really bother me at this point. But now that I think of it, yeah, I was unprepared for this and unaware of it.
I'm used to this sort of thing now, but I still think it's an usual and really unpleasant part of our industry. Most knowledge based fields really don't have anything like this sort of interview/exam (seriously, it's almost a pure exam, I think that describing it as an interview is simply misleading to people who aren't aware of what goes on in our field) - though most fields have a more standardized set of credentialing and degree programs.
I do think that the mysterious, unpredictable, and stressful nature of tech exam interviews deters a lot of people from entering or remaining in this field.
These are students. I would not expect them to start their education knowing about whiteboard interviews. At some point, all of us professional software developers were ignorant about how interviewing worked, and then we learned.
The question is: why are black and hispanic students not reaching this level of understanding at the same rate as whites and Asians? Perhaps they're not doing internships at the same rate? Some other reason? Regardless, this question deserves a serious answer, and not a flip dismissal based on stereotypes about work habits.
High Tech companies rarely recruited at my school (an HBCU) and when they did, they would send some a random manager to talk about diversity, not a recruiter.
Wow, talk about broad strokes. I guess I'll refer to you all my slacker asian and jew friends so they can make some easy cash.
As for "They work harder"... consider the impact of multiple generations of success, versus multiple generations of failure. I grew up what southerners call "poor white trash". I escaped, but barely, and mostly because I was very determined and very smart. When I landed at a high quality private college, I was utterly unprepared for the experience. I grew up listening to my father refer to the wealthy men he worked for as "educated mow-rawns", in that thick Kentucky accent of his. Going to college, surrounded by the children of lawyers and professors and the like, their family life was as alien to me as my dad bouncing in and out of jail was to them. I was embarrassed and ashamed.
Now, throw in the past century of crap that has kept even hardworking and talented black families down, and you can see where the problem might start.
See, I listen to a lot of rap, or "black music". And differences in taste aside, some of the stuff is REALLY complex. Look at Nas, Tupac, or even more recently, Kendrick Lamar. The sheer amount of detail these guys put into their art makes me feel bad about myself as a programmer. These guys work hard at their craft. But you know what, they're not coders.
But here's the thing, quoting Kendrick Lamars "Black Boy Fly": "The only way out the ghetto, you know the stereotype Shooting hoops or live on the stereo like top 40".
The reason why they're not programmers is the same reason why I'm not a rapper. Because I'm white AND asian, and I grew up with a computer instead of a boombox, that my friends coded and didn't rhyme. Not that I don't want to, or that I don't work at it, it's closed doors to me.
I'm fairly certain that black people from the neighbourhoods that I get my music from, walking into a coding interview, even if they've been trying to program for years, they'd be just as lost as me walking into a rap battle. It's not about how hard you work at it, or how hard you push at it. Social mobility takes commitment.
Or succinctly put from the same song " What am I to do when every neighborhood is an obstacle"
That really makes me think. 20 years ago Biggie was saying "Either you're slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot." I guess being on Top 40 is an improvement.
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!
I've barely been to any career events at my school, and professors never mention about whiteboard interviews. My friends in CS don't discuss this either. I just learned right away when I did some basic research on job searching.
Bad students or bad schools, it's really surprising either way they can be that bad.
EDIT: As a general statement (Please argue logically I am interested in the counterarguement):
Some how over thousands of years of almost complete separation, people managed to genetically grow different facial structures but stayed completely the same on the inside? So only physical characteristics are heritable? That's how evolution works?
The whole tenant of evolution is that great effective genes are passed on and reflected in offspring. By arguing that there is no genetic difference you are arguing that IQ cannot be passed on and that different environments did not select for and need different levels of IQ. If you are arguing that, then you are denying evolution as a theory.
Here's a precis:
In the area of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (Iraq/Syria today), several species of grains grow natively - oats, barley, rye, etc. And several species of domesticatable large animals - sheep, horses, cattle - are also native. Very few animals can actually be domesticated.
Grains can be stored for a long time (years), but are hard to digest for humans. The accidental discovery of fermentation led to bread and beer. This gave the people living there a much more stable and high-quality food source than hunter-gathers. Improving the storage led to ceramics. Ceramics led to firing. Firing led to plaster, so they could also build much more durable structures. Experience with high heat fires led to smelting, alloying, and forging metal. The wealth these practices produced led to towns and then cities, and economic specialization - especially trained and well-equipped soldiers. Specialization led to writing, which created more wealth. Herding sheep and cattle, and riding horses, became practical and effective. The wealthy early kingdoms of the Middle East started conquering their neighbors and spreading their technologies.
Fast forward to the example of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the Incas. Pizarro had 160 or so men, with horses, swords, and guns. He completely destroyed a 5000 man Inca army. How? Technology. The Incas weren't stupid or weak, as you're suggesting. They were unprepared. The Incas didn't have horses or sophisticated metalworking - their environment didn't lead to those discoveries. The Spanish sword was the deadliest weapon in the world, the product of a couple thousand years of refinement. Their horses and mounted warfare techniques were the product of thousands of additional years of refinement. Europeans, of course, knew how to fight men on horseback. You build long spears and polearms, and train soldiers to stand their ground against the terrifying charge. The Incas didn't know that. They panicked, scattered, and were easily slaughtered.
They weren't stupid. They weren't weak. They were outgunned.
The Spaniards, of course, were smart as we are, by your concepts. Imagine what would happen if 160 fully armed armed modern soldiers, with the latest weapons, traveling in modern armored vehicles, encountered a 5000 man army of Spaniards with horses and swords?
It's all luck. It's all an accident of history. You're not either intellectually or morally superior to any other race.
Well, since I'm German, let's take the eurocentric approach. When we were walking around in furs scalping Romans, Africa was going pretty strong, wasn't it. China was going strong. The middle east was a major power. At that point, you could feasibly say that the Germanic savages were unanimously across the world, across all human time (eg. the last 200 years), doing worse than other groups of people. We just did kinda well, hit or miss, over the last 1000 years, which across the timescales humanity has been existing, isn't that much.
Other areas haven't been as lucky. Native Americans (last 200 years), Africa (last 300 years), China (last 200 years), the Ottoman empire (last 100 years), Russia (last 100 years) but hell, Austria isn't as hot as it was 100 years ago. But China is bouncing back, Africa is bouncing back, India is bouncing back.
Do you think white peoples under representation in US pro sports is more due to genetics or environmental influence?
Having worked in Sillycon Valley for a long time I think it's funny/sad how the whole scene pretends to be PC about race and diversity issues when pretty much all the tech employees there are white or Indian males.
What's even funnier is that white people are only a small percentage of world population but have the audacity to refer to all other races as 'minorities'.
I don't know any good solution to systemic race/diversity issues other than making mushrooms legal and mandatory.
In Europe, say, Africans play a lot of football. But there's also just as many whites who do- so are African Americans only endowed with the kind of genetics that help them play good basketball? Or are Africans in general endowed with good _basketball_ genetics, but not good _football_ genetics?
And what about European basketball? Why are basketball teams in Europe not predominantly African American?
[Where "football" read "soccer" if you're on the other side of the pond, please]
I am fairly certain that is because they are often referring to other races in their own countries. If you live in the US, most of your news is about North America and Europe, both continents that are predominantly filled with white people.
I would bet a large percentage of Americans couldn't identify their home state on a map of the world.
Whatever role genetics play in IQ are most certainly not manifested in the concentration of melanin in one's skin or the coarseness of one's hair or the color of one's eyes or the size of one's nose or any of the other crude heuristics we use to group people up as "races".
Still, even with a racial component to genetic IQ, we know that "tech" is not some enlightened trade where only high IQ employees are considered, outside of the elite firms like Google, Apple etc you're going to find a glut of pretty average programmers and plenty of idiots to boot.
You are making the case that intraracial facial structures all resemble each other, but internally how people are connected (brain structure) does not follow the same pattern. Some how over thousands of years of almost complete seperation, people managed to genetically grow different facial strucutres but stayed completely the same on the inside? The whole tenant of evolution is that great effective genes are passed on and reflected in offspring. By arguing that there is no genetic difference you are arguing that IQ cannot be passed on and that different environments did not select for and need different levels of IQ. If you are arguing that, then you are denying evolution as a theory.
No, my point is precisely the opposite. I'm making the case that facial structures are a crude approximation for genetic classification because it's not true that all "black" people have a dark skin complexion, not all "black" people have thick kinky hair, there is genetic diversity within the "black" community because the definition of "black" is fluid and based on an amalgamation of regional, political, cultural and apparent (as in apparent to the naked eye) genetic factors.
This kind of trainwreck flamewar is the worst thing on this site.
More importantly: Even if you're right, it can also be true that blacks and hispanics suffer from discrimination. Better to err on the side of helping the disadvantaged than to use an excuse like, "Eh, most of them aren't as smart as us."
Lastly, I prefer Gwern's response to the race & IQ debate.[1] The whole topic is radioactive. The best course of action is to stay silent. Eventually, gene sequencing will get cheaper and the data will be overwhelming (in support of one hypothesis or the other).
1. https://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#iq-race
What are you saying? are you really saying the lighter the skin the more "intelligent" one is? Ceteris paribus ? you know it's ridiculous and you know where this kind of "pseudo-scientific" ideology leads.
> Is that why we hide the truth,
What truth ? racism ? Ask yourself ,did you come to that conclusion after researching the topic or where you seeking arguments to fuel and rationalize your pre-existing bigotry ? Because with the same arguments you could make the same case to justify sexism or antisemitism. Yes for the nazis, the "vile" nature of the jews came from their genes.
Which means, it's _very_ difficult to see how "IQ" itself would be an inherited trait, seeing as it's not a trait at all. It's not even a thing at all. All that IQ is, entirely literally, is a score on some test that some people have taken.
I mean, I hope it's obvious how it's completely ridiculous to believe that you can pass on your score at a test to your offspring, right?
So basically we have an arbitrary measure correlated with another arbitrary measure. We don't have much to draw firm conclusions on.
And that agrees with the other thing you bring up:
>> "Iq .. is a massive predictor for success in life."
That may just as well be an outcome of racial bias against non-whites in the US. In which case, IQ would be a pretty accurate measure of racial bias, but not of intelligence.
You're asking "so why do blacks score lower in IQ tests?". I'm answering: who knows why. The fact that they do means the test is probably broken, not that they're less intelligent for real.
Basically, any test result that just so happens to agree with some widely held societal belief should set the bias alarm off.
See my point above - physical characteristics are directly observable, and therefore, measurable. Mental, emotional etc psychological characteristics are not directly observable, so are only measurable through a proxy.
In the case of intelligence, the proxy is an IQ test and we don't even have a good definition of what it is we're proxying, so it might not even be a single characteristic, but rather the combination of many traits.
So yeah, we can say very safely that you can get your eyes or your height from your parents, but not so about your IQ.
Corollary, maybe you can inherit your _intelligence_ but since we don't have a good definition of that and no way to measure it directly, there's no solid ground to stand on arguing that this or that "race" has more or less of it. And the same goes for any other group, really.
Full disclosure: I'm interested in this discussion too, mostly because I believe the whole idea of IQ measurements is bogus to begin with.
There is very little disagreement on that in the field of AI. In fact, there is so much agreement that we have no idea what intelligence is, that we've totally given up on trying to understand it and instead switched to hoping that intelligence will naturally arise if we create complex enough systems (complex enough that we also don't understand them very well).
All that said, you're welcome to point me to the studies that are relevant to your field and I will gladly go through them, although I can't guarantee that I have the time to do so on time to continue this debate in this thread.
People may still quibble, but I was under the impression the standard acceptable definition for intelligence (at least among AI folks) is Legg and Hutter's informal "the ability to efficiently achieve goals in a wide range of domains". (Which has been formalized with AIXI.) I'm also aware of several groups in the AI field who believe they can actually construct a mind, in fact that this is the safest way forward, and that hoping it just "emerges" is folly as old as the first neural net proponents...
Everyone else reading this can find the flag button quickly by clicking on the timestamp next to the name on the comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11185269
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11083482
This is of course one datapoint, but the university I went to (top engineering school in the Northeast US) hosts a big panel for computer-field majors at the annual admissions event. Any students remotely interested in technical majors are invited to attend - you don't even need to be accepted to the university. The marketing for the event makes it as clear as possible that no prior programming experience is required, they just want to get people excited about computing. When I served on the panel as a CS student, I looked out the audience and saw a fully packed room (300+ people) of almost entirely white/Asian male prospective students and their parents. At that point, how do you recover and get diverse people? How do you get people interested when everyone showing up fits the same description?
In my view, the problem starts way before college/job seeking. I was lucky, as a white male, that my parents noticed and encouraged my technical interests at an early age. By the time I was entering college, I had years of programming experience, not even at any company, but just working on my laptop in my bedroom. It kills me that so many minorities and women never even get that opportunity. Parents of young girls don't seem to see/nurture those interests, and sometimes actively encourage them not to go into technology. It makes perfect sense that later they're not interested in pursuing college/careers in computers.
I have worked at companies where the people doing hiring have literally whispered (since it is illegal to say so) that they are desperate to hire minorities and women. I once heard someone say, "Man, I would love to hire this person, but I have to be fair, and if they were male I would have rejected them immediately".
Yes, tech companies need to be as accepting as possible towards minorities and women. Yes, minorities and women need role models in the industry. But we've got to start at the source at the problem and get parents to allow their children to be interested in computers in the first place!
Schooling is particularly worrying - it's got a troubling focus on instilling conformity, and AFAIK that's both more effective on women and particularly damaging to creative work like computer programming.
There's a knowledge and understanding gap on both sides---both in terms of what companies understand about how students are prepared and what schools understand about what skillsets students need to excel in technology fields. It turns out outreach and active participation can be valuable to bridge that gap.
And if you want that to happen, you need to set up incentives such that it's in tech companies best interests to do so. You can't just say that things would be better if something were to happen - identifying problems is the easy part. Identifying what needs to change and how to change it is the hard part.
My entryway into computers was "I want to build a website like this one, but better." This same opportunity exists for everyone with a web browser, which is most everyone. You had the additional fortune of parents seeking out opportunities for you, but it was not necessary, and I suspect you'd have found your way to tech eventually even with no external support.
Maybe it's painful because you want more diversity in your life? Why not fulfill that desire outside of work? Maybe it's painful to work on legacy stuff that you're sure with a more diverse mindset wouldn't be so crufty? I think we've come impressively far with the current (and in the past "worse") state of affairs, clearly we don't need the diversity to accomplish greatness. I'm on a team with Indians, Koreans, Chinese...and two other white guys. Our manager is black. Our manager's manager is a woman. I don't think this diversity gives us any technical advantage, but since we're all competent, there's not really any disadvantage, this is just how the dice fell for us. The only way this diversity impacts me is that my name gets mispronounced (and vice versa for some of them). But as you mention there are a lot of diversity advocates who want diversity over merit for some mysterious reason and will actively sabotage teams to get it.
Research has found that during hiring, managers are biased against black-sounding names on résumés, for instance, and interviewers weigh too heavily whether they’d want to hang out with someone.
This may happen in other jobs, but in my 20 years in tech, I have never seen this. Go to any good tech company, and see the odd folks walking about. And yet they'll have an issue with black or hispanic folks? I doubt it.
Network does play a role, I will agree. But what plays a bigger role is your technical chops; and it is very easy today to demonstrate your skills via SO or Github.
It's typically called "culture fit".
EDIT: Not all culture fit is bad, I think it's important that people can work together. But it can easily disguise any number of subjective biases, many of which you may not be aware.
For example, bias against black-sounding names is a real thing. It doesn't really matter if you personally have seen it, or if you think you haven't seen it. It's still real and quantifiable.
Most of us should continue to be skeptical that statistical analyses about these things must be carried out robustly and stand up to statistical grokking ... but conditional on that, believe the data and not your gut.
Without considering where the data came from, under what assumptions was it collected, when was it collected, etc. how can you blindly lay faith in some "data"? I have some data which says N horses died on the streets of San Francisco last year; will you believe it? It just so happens that "last year" was 1895. Doesn't that make the "data" useless?
Show me any other major industrial sector where a 17-year-old can start a company and be bought out for $30MM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D'Aloisio#Summly Show me where highschool dropouts can make more than Harvard MBAs.
Yes, tech has problems with gender or ageism; but skin color is hardly ever an issue. In fact, if it is, it is in the other direction. I had a friend who graduated from a top CS school and couldn't get a faculty position. The Chair at one department actually told him: if you were a woman or minority, I'd hire you right away.
BTW: I'm not implying that everything is great. But compared to other sectors, tech is actually a pretty decent place to be if you don't "fit in" into the convention.
I didn't say blindly believe the data or blindly believe your gut.
But many people use their anecdotal experiences as justification to deny clearly significant trends because they personally "never observed it."
> Show me any other major industrial sector where a 17-year-old can start a company and be bought out for $30MM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D'Aloisio#Summly Show me where highschool dropouts can make more than Harvard MBAs.
In a lot of ways these are not good things about our field. They represent a lot of the ways that toxic culture and a flight from quality are pervasive in tech. In tech, it's rarely about actually adding value and often much more about extracting rents from marketing and status. Just like it is in tons of other fields.
Tech is not like this because tech is more meritocratic. Tech is absolutely not meritocratic.
> but skin color is hardly ever an issue.
What are you basing this on? As far as I can tell, only your vague assessment of your personal observations. OK. That's not nothing. But because a lot of people present compelling arguments that it is an issue, I'm generally not just going to take some anecdotal reasoning. There are other explanations. Maybe you've been around racial bias and just not noticed it. Or maybe you've been extremely lucky to avoid being near it. Either of those are more plausible that the unlikely case that your anecdotal experience just happens to be more representative than all of the principled studies (which yes, always have flaws, but no that's not a good reason to believe their basic premise is entirely wrong).
I've been in Tech about 25 to 30 years. I'm sad to report that I have seen it happen a time or two in tech. But what I will say... is that before I went into "pure" tech, it happened in other fields in a much more overt manner.
I was a peon at DDB Needham in Chicago a long time ago and was talking to a friend of mine when one of the VP's came into her cube. The VP wanted her to go through the resumes and circular file all of the ones who were black. My friend asked how would she know if they were black... the woman said "Oh... you'll know. Look at the names."
As it happened some other friends of mine were talking about starting a company using this really cool thing called "WinSock" to do networking. So I went home that night and joined them. I'd had enough of the BigCo lifestyle. Two really good exits later ... here I am. So I really ought to thank that VP lady.
I ran into that attitude a couple of times in tech over the 25 or so years since then... but not NEARLY as often as when I was doing the BigCo thing. It does happen though. And I tended to run away from those people as fast and as far as I could.
I can expand later if anyone is interested in a real conversation.
Sure tech is generally non-black, but there are load of East Asians and South Asians. It's not exactly the Augusta National Golf Club.
There are a lot of places in corporate information technology in the US where tech is "very very" Indian and a white or black or hispanic person may very well be the only non-Indian (or even US citizen or permanent resident) in the room or on the team.
The point still stands though if you replace the word "white" with "non-black / hispanic". There are vast cultural and systemic barriers that some minorities go through in the United States (black / latino) to get to becoming a software engineer, and not others (Asian).
There remains pernicious and not widely appreciated systemic bias in this industry, and until it's even acknowledged we're not going to have much luck in tackling it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11102712
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587
I would really recommend this article http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...
1. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...
Edit: If my comment seems unnecessary, it's because MollyR edited-in a link to the Slate Star Codex post before I finished mine. I'm glad I'm not the only one who's read SSC's rebuttal.
If a college has a large white population, most white people will be friends with mostly white people. Maybe a few start a company. They refer to their networks for early employees. Those networks are mostly white. The early employees become managers and hire primarily through the same channels, perpetuating the imbalance (as defined by having vastly unequal representation compared to the general population).
I have trouble prescribing solutions to diversity imbalances because it is hard to say where and when the imbalance is a problem. The only thing I can imagine that would be helpful is to have more people of different backgrounds engage each other on each other's turf. Make friends. Maybe start a business. Let the networks expand from day one. Otherwise, you're always playing catch-up.
As an aside, I attended RIT, which, aside from being overwhelmingly white, contains the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which has an awe-inspiring diversity in its student body. That proximity taught me a lot about deaf and hard-of-hearing culture, which, because of the aforementioned incredible racial diversity, taught me a lot about lives other than my own as well.
I can't begin to understand how it is an issue, and I'm black (and European). I don't care about the color or the sex of my coworkers. What difference does it make? you can't relate to white people? No the main issue is networking and going out of one's own "sphere" or microcosm.
> So some of the students may be opting out simply because they want a more diverse workplace
If they really like programming then they should worry about programming first and foremost, not how diverse is their environment. But maybe it's because of my upbringing, when I was the only black in a class of 30 students, I didn't have the time or any interest in worrying about the "blackness" of the classroom. I didn't have the time to worry about my tastes being "black" or white or whatever.
Do some people have it easier because they are white ? Sure, people trust their kin more, and you talking about being "only black person in the room" is in my opinion the expression of that fact. What is true for white people is also true for black people, it's human nature.
Read my comment later, where I mentioned that I have more white friends than black friends. I have no problem with white people. And no, I don't care about the color or sex of my coworkers. Instead, I was describing a very real phenomenom which may have been overlooked in the article.
> If they really like programming then they should worry about programming first and foremost, not how diverse is their environment. But maybe it's because of my upbringing, when I was the only black in a class of 30 students, I didn't have the time or any interest in worrying about the "blackness" of the classroom. I didn't have the time to worry about my tastes being "black" or white or whatever.
Not sure if you or I should say what those students should be worrying about. I think you may be missing my point. I made no mention about what those students should do. Instead, I talked about what they may be doing.
> Sure, people trust their kin more, and you talking about being "only black person in the room" is in my opinion the expression of that fact.
Actually that came from my personal experience (and that of many other POC) of trusting people who are not my kin, and then having race be brought up in a way that was detrimental to me.
> Instead, I was describing a very real phenomenom which may have been overlooked in the article.
Ok, I understand and I agree with you then.
> Not sure if you or I should say what those students should be worrying about. I think you may be missing my point. I made no mention about what those students should do. Instead, I talked about what they may be doing.
Agreed.
> Actually that came from my personal experience (and that of many other POC) of trusting people who are not my kin, and then having race be brought up in a way that was detrimental to me.
You know it happened to me too and no need to say that in Europe people are less PC than in US. That's of course unacceptable and every time it happened I fought it. It's often more ignorance than ideology, i.e. casual racism. What I'm seriously worried about is all that "reverse racism" that is also becoming casual in US. It doesn't build trust between cultures/minorities, It's just making things worse in my opinion.
But I would argue tech is a meritocracy - not perfect - but very much a meritocracy.
"Be the change you want".
And plenty people of color put on race blinders or never encounter any issues, but that doesn't mean hostile environments do not exist. In my personal experience, it varies wildly from city to city and company to company. I've worked at companies that celebrate black history month and companies where white managers think it's fun to touch black women's hair.
Well put. Thanks for posting valuable comments instead of responding in kind—it greatly improved this thread.
It takes longer for reflective and informative comments to show up than it does for reflexive ones, but they do eventually. It takes time to think and write something good. And often a thoughtful comment only gets posted because someone feels compelled to reply to a glib one. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184489.
The only way a company should be responsible for hiring underrepresented minorities is if there was a market inefficiency to be exploited. And even then, that's a responsibility to their shareholders, not to society. And "we hire black people because we don't have to pay them as much" probably wouldn't go over too well, anyway.
Hiring managers and executives should use all of the tools at their disposal in the context of recruitment and hiring - including moral and ethical judgement.
Setting moral responsibilities aside - if you want to hire talented, passionate engineers like me, you will get serious about building teams with people from diverse backgrounds.
There's a pretty major leap in logic, there. What does diversity have to do with talented, passionate engineering teams? Companies like Honda and Toyota have some of the least diverse engineering teams on the planet, and yet they have a well-earned reputation for engineering excellence.
You may want a company to take diversity seriously, and there are many others who feel the same way. But it doesn't follow that maximizing diversity is therefor an imperative for companies that want to have world-class teams. In fact diversity seems to be orthogonal to competence.
I wasn't delving into the merits of diversity - I believe in it; I'm seeing it put to the test every day at my company, and I like what I see.
> it doesn't follow that maximizing diversity is therefor an imperative for companies that want to have world-class teams.
Diversity isn't about addition/subtraction, nor is it calculus; it's not even sociology, macroeconomics, or socioeconomics.
Diversity is about adaptive systems.
> In fact diversity seems to be orthogonal to competence.
I'll concede this point, but only with the substitution of "productivity" for "competence". Homogenous teams can outperform diverse teams, IN THE SHORT TERM.
Diversity may lead directly to inefficiency and conflict. In the short term, these are painful inhibitors to productivity.
In the long term, diversity of backgrounds, capabilities and perspectives - properly aligned - can be a huge asset.
If you are building a new company, and you want to beat the world, you'd be foolish to hire a bunch of people who think about things the same way that you do.
Er, because they're part of society?
And because in the case of giants of the corporate world, like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, they actually do have the wherewithal to influence that society to a degree that even governments often don't?
Corporations are, like Westphalian nation-states, explicitly amoral entities. The extent to which they behave morally is due to market and/or political pressure, not any inherent moral judgement.
Apple makes consumer devices. That's their business. They have a responsibility to make the greatest possible profit selling those devices. That's where their responsibility begins and ends.
Now, there are all sorts of moral dimensions that can affect their decisions. If their phones were made with slave labour, people might not buy them and talent might not want to work for them. But the reason Apple doesn't employ slave labour isn't because it is a moral entity; it isn't. Apple doesn't employ slave labour because doing so would hurt its bottom line.
If you want companies to behave in an ethical fashion, you need to align legal, social, market, tax, and other incentives in order to push them in that direction. Expecting them to do so out of the goodness of their hearts is quixotic: they have no hearts with which to be good.
You mean, if I want the big companies to do good (or "not do evil") I have to pay up to them?
But the people who make up those big companies also have to live in the same society as everyone else. So they should already have an incentive to do good to those societies- they will personally benefit from that good-doing. Why do they need me, or anyone else, to provide that incentive?
We all live in the same world, we all have a responsibility to be morally considerate in it. "Companies" are not "amoral entities", neither are nations. Because they are groups of lots of people, who all are subject to moral judgement.
"I was just following orders" is not an excuse anymore, and neither should "I was just doing my job" be.
It means you need to align incentives. Those can be positive (tax breaks for hiring veterans) or negative (penalties for violating antitrust laws), but they are incentives nonetheless.
>So they should already have an incentive to do good to those societies- they will personally benefit from that good-doing.
Do you, individually, benefit more from living in a society where mining companies don't dump toxic chemicals in rivers in third world countries, or from making your quarterly bonuses? This is a classic tragedy of the commons.
>Why do they need me, or anyone else, to provide that incentive?
Because companies are amoral profit-maximization constructs.
>"Companies" are not "amoral entities", neither are nations.
There are many corporations and politicians who are more than happy to indulge that fantasy in exchange for your money or vote.
You can rant and rave about evil corporations till you're blue in the face, and you won't change a damned thing. Corporations respond to incentives, not moral pleas. Change the incentives if you want to change the behaviour.
Then again, software engineering has only been a thing for about 40-50 odd years and is young as compared to other professions, so I guess things will change.
Tech is like that. There are jerks, and there are racists, and there are abusive personalities. There are real, definite problems. It's still closer to a meritocracy than almost anywhere else. It's good enough that (to me) it's worth going into, problems and all. (Any individual situation may become toxic enough that you need to leave. But overall, I don't think it's bad enough to avoid, especially if that's where you would like to be.)
Various groups had faced real discrimination in the job market - jews, italians, irish, etc. Here's one piece of historical trivia - Warren Buffett could not get his first Wall Street job because the company he really wanted to work for had a policy of only hiring Jews - because all other Wall Street banks would not.
Ie industries had real 'no X allowed' policies in place - not this 'Oh, I don't feel like being the only black guy in the room'. Well too bad for you - the job will pay money to someone else who doesn't necessarily have to be around people like them.
Today whites, Asians and Indians are supposed to feel bad because other ethnicities don't make sufficient effort to join the industry? I'm sorry, I don't.
Reverse racism is certainly a real thing. Bigotry against white people is certainly a real thing. Go spend 5 minutes on salon.com, come back and tell me with a straight face that these people don't flirt with racism against white people.
As a black person, this kind of ideology isn't helping me. It's only helping pundits selling outrage.
Claiming Salon advocates for racism against whites promotes outrage. People are too sensitive.