The article above says that "Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.", but in fact means "same as us: young white/indian/asian boys".
"Culture" is a get out of jail free card that allows anyone to deny a job to anyone at all whilst sounding entirely credible and important.
If you really want diversity then you would require reasons for rejecting any candidate, but you're not allowed to say "they weren't a cultural fit".
So what is the reason that white/indian/asian boys are preferred? Genuinely curious.
I have mostly experience in London and there the landscape is extremely diverse. Why would any company not hire any ethnicity if they are good at what they do?
I've wondered this. If there are so many talented underpaid people, isn't the right response to form a company that specifically hires from these groups? Should be a whole lot of money to be made.
Second, why don't these people (apparently) band together? Where are the <underrepresented demographic> founders that hire people that are a cultural fit for them?
I don't get why the blame is put on "silicon valley"; they don't have an obligation to provide work for everyone.
Maybe whites/indians/asians aren't "preferred" in the sense of active racial discrimination. But the people currently at the company, being mostly of that ethnicity, may have personal contact lists/rolodecks that are weighted toward that ethnicity. I can attest to that as a Vietnamese-American myself. The vast majority of my childhood friends are white because I grew up in the Midwest. But I had far more Vietnamese friends than would be statistically expected because the few Vietnamese families in the community just hung out regularly even as they integrated with the rest of the town.
If you grew up not just white, but upper-middle class and above, how many black people, statistically speaking, are you regularly in contact with? Versus someone who grows up lower-income or in the inner city? Being relatively well-off, you have a statistically better chance of getting a better K-12 education, which leads to a better chance at a top-tier school, and then to a top-tier company. You eventually are in a position to make recommendations for hires, and statistically speaking, you know more qualified whites than you do blacks and Hispanics. Statistically speaking, at many companies, recommendations from current employers carry a lot of weight.
Over time, this statistical weighting of life experiences would lead to a mostly white/Asian workforce at a tech company. And no one in this process was ever thinking "No blacks".
So to actually get a workforce that includes a representative number of a disenfranchised minority group, you actively have to seek it out. If you are in Silicon Valley, you have to actively make the decision to fly out to Howard U to do recruiting instead of the much more rational and cost-efficient decision to base recruiting at Stanford and Berkeley.
I would probably add that a portion of these are temporary work visa holders (e.g: H-1B). If you get terminated under these visas you are out of status and need to leave the country.
Being on a temporary worker visa makes workers submissive and gives companies leverage over the employee.
Strangely, hiring your friends is seen as corruption when it's for the government, but it's somehow the proper way to do things for the private sector. If companies really do exist to serve potential employees, then we should require them to do that fairly. However, if they're there to provide value for their customers, then maybe it doesn't matter who's friends they hire or what race they or how the discriminate. Nobody has a right to work at Google.
Well, it may be considered corruption also because governments have written and set rules about the hiring process. And giving a friend a boost is likely to violate some of those rules.
I have a personal example of how a friendship helped me get a job. Out of college I didn't get any offers that I liked and was just hanging out at home (fwiw, a luxury that some disenfranchised groups are less likely to have). One of my friends had to decline her summer internship with late notice, but she told the manager to consider me.
I was qualified on paper. Given that it was such late notice, it probably made sense to just fly me in rather than restart the search. The interview went fine, and I was hired.
There is no way I would have gotten that internship if me and my friend weren't friends. Why? Because I'm pretty sure I applied to that company through the normal process and apparently I didn't make the cut. I did not do anything to suddenly become more of a qualified candidate between the time of that rejection and when they decided to give me a call, and yet I ended up with an internship that immediately led to a job and to which I've never really had a problem finding employment in the decade since.
As much as I like myself, I can think of plenty of classmates and friends who were harder-working and more experience and qualifications who had much harder professional paths. And I'm sure there are people who I don't know who are also more qualified than me.
So is my success "fair"? What does that word even mean? What is the most ideal form of "fair" hiring? The "best" candidate? Is there any company or profession in existence in which the definition of "best" doesn't immediately introduce a whole bunch of subjective factors. And if "best" is the priority, then how much is a company obligated to expand the geographical and chronological scope of their search to make absolutely sure they've found the best candidate possible?
My field report on "culture fit" would be child of academic or fussy schoolteacher. There's a sort of pedantry in their communication that will take you further than your abilities in academia, yet really rubs everyone else the wrong way.
As a company, or sports team, or anything, you have every right to protect the existing group dynamic and to avoid distractions or negative influences.
An Indian mother with young kids and a heavy accent.... is that "cultural fit" to a hip and young fast moving programming team of boys who like to do hackathons and have beers on friday night? Does your team employ any such people right now? I know for sure there's plenty of them applying for jobs....
How the hell could "same as us" mean "white/indian/asian boys"? I'm a white man from eastern Europe and the white americans I work with are anything but the same culture as mine. Indians could well be from another planet. Interestingly enough (though only anecdotal) black US workers have a more similar way of thinking to mine than white US ones.
There's huge diversity in IT, you're just too blinded by your ideology to see it. You are the problem with your black/white quotas. You think there's diversity/differences inborn in the skin color. And that kind of thinking is called racism.
If you ever worked for a truly great company, with tons of inspirational people, then you know the culture stuff is real. Very real. Once company loses it, most of the best talent will simply walk away, because there is only so much motivation you can get with money (and competition doesn't usually pay really much less anyway).
Never worked in US, so hardly understanding the pathological obsession with political correctness there.
I once experienced this great environment, and even though I am now paid maybe 4x as much, this was by far, far, far the best working experience I ever had. The relationships from this period are still alive across whole (former) staff even after the company was bought 8 years ago by international corp and lost much of its mojo (and within few months tons of those great people left for jobs that weren't paid more).
As for the topic discussed, yeah just hire the best fit for hard and soft skills whatever the background, color of skin or native language. This is true equality, in mind and in action. Anybody expecting that spread across races/skin color/religion/whatever will be 100% matching that of general population is dangerously naive though
The culture is young, single, not going to rock the boat. Why do they trendy SV companies have everything on site? So you don't leave them site. Parents do.
You're implying that "culture" so defined doesn't actually affect the work process. But what if it does? What if exclusive, unfair selection of employees actually induces them to work harder or more efficiently?
I don't believe this[1], and if it were true, it wouldn't make the situation much better. But the alternate hypothesis is that all of these companies are leaving money on the table. These companies like to play on the idea that people should enjoy their jobs, which is obviously ridiculous because it's work, but if you can fool people into believing it, you can get them to work overtime and you profit. If letting your employees be casually racist means you get 15% more work out of them at the cost of 15% of your hiring pool it's a win because you save on labor costs. A necessary presupposition of the exercise is that the employees can be swayed by appeals to tribal psychology -- support the team (company) -- which is also the basis of racism. It sounds stupid when I say "letting your employees be casually racist" but if I substitute "only hire League of Legends players" it's obvious what's going on. It just so happens that the culture associated with many forms of entertainment techies enjoy is toxic to minorities and tends to be less black/Latino and more white/Asian than America as a whole. And all these things are tied together in the patchwork of culture. The utility of this sort of cultural Tom Sawyering extends beyond tech; it's crucial to the armed forces, for example, but appealing to minorities had more upsides for the financial backers in that case, and the military has more control over the culture it instills in soldiers, whereas Google et al ride the wave of contemporary US nerd affectations.
[1] - okay, why not? There may be some culturally homogenous workplaces but it's not the norm in my experience. The lack of black people at tech companies probably is also related to the fact that they're in cities with fewer black people and depend heavily on referrals for hiring. But referrals depend on friendships which goes back to that culture of entertainment for nerds I was talking about.
So does the UK, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Australia, NZ, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, and every other Western, white-dominant tech host country.
Of course the workplace will be "white-dominant" if the majority is white. Not that many blacks in Ireland (1.5%) for the question to even matter.
That wasn't the question, it was whether race bias plays any large role in hirings as in the US, which in UK, Canada, nordic countries etc it doesn't, as it doesn't in the societies in general.
Can't speak for South Africa, Australia or NZ, far enough from Western Europe to be what I meant.
No, actually that was not the question. The unsupported grandparent statement was that the US is "crazy about race as always." Well, the US is also a lot more racially diverse than those countries. So it's a bit of an apples-oranges comparison when discussing diversity. And I already know about the homogeneous populations of those countries. A couple of points:
1. It's rather convenient for your argument, isn't it, that some of the aforementioned countries (the Scandinavian ones) don't have any substantial black population. So no need to correct race bias there...there aren't many black workers there! Nice job.
2. The UK actually does have a significant black population, and if you look at UK tech companies I think you'll see that they have close to the same percentage of black programmers as in the US.
Subsidiary point: being smug about supposed Euro superiority re: race bias in tech hiring and engaging in America bashing is a weak reed to lean on.
>No, actually that was not the question. The unsupported grandparent statement was that the US is "crazy about race as always." Well, the US is also a lot more racially diverse than those countries.
Well, the US also didn't have any history (as US) before 1942 or so, so of course it got populated by "more racially diverse" population -- not because of the benevolence and multiculturalism of people already living there, but because people came in from all corners, grabbed land, and established a new country (in the process giving the real native population the short end of the stick).
And despite that, the US had slaves long after European countries had abolished that practice, it had segregation long after Europe has done with it (which was rarely an issue here), and is still uptight about race in ways Europe isn't.
Let's not even get into how 25% of the world's prisoners are in the US that only has 4% of the world's total population -- and how many of them are black compared to the whites there.
That's what makes it "crazy about race as always".
>1. It's rather convenient for your argument, isn't it, that some of the aforementioned countries (the Scandinavian ones) don't have any substantial black population.
Well, sorry that Sweden didn't abduct and bought people from Africa so that it can now have more blacks... They do have a 5-7% of muslim immigrants, does that count?
> And despite that, the US had slaves long after European countries had abolished that practice, it had segregation long after Europe has done with it (which was rarely an issue here), and is still uptight about race in ways Europe isn't.
And Europe is extremely uptight about Holocaust-related things in ways that America isn't. This isn't surprising; we should expect laws and norms to be directly affected by a country's history.
That the U.S. was, as you point out, a latecomer to the abolition and desegregation, would seem to justify the U.S. being more "uptight" (some would say, "vigilant") about racial discrimination issues. Why should that be seen as being "crazy about race"?
>And Europe is extremely uptight about Holocaust-related things in ways that America isn't.
Germany perhaps. Most of Europe, not.
>That the U.S. was, as you point out, a latecomer to the abolition and desegregation, would seem to justify the U.S. being more "uptight" (some would say, "vigilant") about racial discrimination issues. Why should that be seen as being "crazy about race"?
Because the US still has a thing for race, in a degree and a way that western european countries don't.
Not just being "uptight" but active redlining, active huge overrepresentation of blacks in jail, active police open season on blacks, active open racism and much more.
No argument there about the disenfranchisement that blacks and other groups still face. You're arguing that this is a result of America's "thing for race"? That if America was more laid back about it, this would help to reduce the disenfranchisement?
I think yes, because the "thing for race" cuts both ways (appears in both anti-racists and racists) -- and makes race all the more apparent (instead of something that should be inconsequential).
the US also didn't have any history (as US) before 1942 or so
That is incorrect. US history begins in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. And before it was a federation of States, people had been there homesteading when the territory was an English colony.
the US had slaves long after European countries had abolished that practice
That is also incorrect. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 due to the efforts of Wilberforce, et al. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1865. That's a little over 30 years, hardly a "long time" even for a country less than a century old. That's not even one full generation.
I dunno man, I think I'll take US "uptightness" any day over the English version of "uptight." And I say that as someone whose grandparents were British subjects!
Not even technically (although I did mean 1492). The fact that US history begins in 1776 doesn't make the fact that US doesn't have a history before 1492 untrue. If anything, it makes it even stronger: it not only didn't have a history, it didn't even exist for another 3 centuries or so.
In any case, I was referring to the whole history of the now-US settlements, no just the history of the US as a state.
>That is also incorrect. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 due to the efforts of Wilberforce, et al. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1865. That's a little over 30 years, hardly a "long time" even for a country less than a century old.
I spoke of "other European countries". You only mentioned one, the British Empire, and even itself abolished slavery 30 years before the US. Others did it much earlier. So much for being some shining beacon of freedom. Besides, even 1833 is the date for the British Empire at large. In the UK slavery was abolished much earlier still.
This kind of made me throw up in my mouth a little.
It's like every smart kid who knows something about computers is chomping at the bit to become a mercenary-in-training for soulless megacorps, and their keepers are every bit as gung-ho on making that happen.
Instead of making overtures to Google and Facebook, they should be making the next big thing that kicks them square in the nuts. If anyone from Howard University is reading this, get started on it. I believe in you.
> The slow progress reflects the knottiness of one of Silicon Valley’s most persistent problems: It’s too white.
That's not true. Whites are underrepresented at Silicon Valley companies compared to their share of the US population. Asians are massively, massively over represented. Why?
There is no way to answer the question without opening the can of worms that is test scores, IQ, etc. So instead of being honest, the story paints a politically convenient narrative that is not actually true.
I don't know about work, but getting travel visa for people with African citizenships for attending conferences can be really hard. This could probably be solved if companies wanted to.
A path to immigration and citizenship for citizens of African countries is only easier than for those of Indian or Chinese origin -- much shorter EB-2/EB-3 waiting times, higher chance of winning the DV lottery, etc.
They don’t find the science of psychometric credible. This is a trifle harsh since psychometrics is very, very extensively validated, not something one can say of social psychology, for example.
I mean believing that there's a scientific concept that corresponds to the pre-genetics concept of "race".
These "race realists" claim they have a good way to scientifically measure IQ, and that IQ is really important and then propose solutions that don't involve measuring IQ, but rather looking at people's skin color.
It's a somewhat transparent bait and switch (or mott and bailey).
I'm not sure that's what is happening here. If there are inequalities in race in America, it's kind of assumed that it's due to some sort of systemic racism. But what if it's caused by something else? What if it selects for socioeconomic status? Or cultural values? It's fairly known that there is a correlation between race and culture in America.
If there is a culture that breeds better self-control, better long-term goal attainment, and greater consideration for other people, doesn't it make sense that it would be a culture that does better than others?
The Indian subcontinent has more population substructure than anywhere else I’m aware of. The different sub-castes (jati) are endogomous to a really surprising degree. It’s entirely possible some jati are way smarter than the Indian average. Parsis have the same kind of ludicrous over representation in terms of high achievement as Askenazim do.
This is obviously not the whole story though. Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims from pre-partition Punjab are little different genetically apart from way higher Muslim inbreeding. IIRC all three groups outperform native Britons though and they’re mostly the descendants of peasants. Some likely very large portion of Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi educational underperformance is terrible education systems. There’s a great section in Poor Economics, Esther Duflo and Abhijit Bannerjee on education in the developing world, covering Kenya and India among others. It’s mostly crap.
OK, I'll bite. Maybe it is wrong that SV companies have proportionally more Asians than whites. Not "morally wrong", but wrong in the sense that Asian communities have optimized for certain metrics (tests, school performances, college aspirations) and SV companies have just gone along with what's in the pipeline. Despite the fact that SV has a long history of highly successful companies being started by dropouts and other kinds of "miscreants".
So these SV companies should alter their recruiting process so that their hiring pool isn't basically a mirror of Stanford's application pool. (full disclosure: I'm Asian. I also work at Stanford. I also play no part in Stanford admissions and probably have less clue about it than the average outsider)
That's fair enough. So what's wrong with making an effort to examine the ways that the SV hiring process systematically -- but not intentionally or maliciously -- filters out blacks, Hispanics, and women from engineering positions?
>Maybe it is wrong that SV companies have proportionally more Asians than whites. Not "morally wrong", but wrong in the sense that Asian communities have optimized for certain metrics (tests, school performances, college aspirations) and SV companies have just gone along with what's in the pipeline.
How is that wrong? Let the other communities optimize for those metrics too.
And if those other communities have a history of systemic oppression, poorly funded school districts, legal bias against them, etc, attempt to fix that too (which would be even more important for the community overall than getting more people from the community to work in some specific industry).
>Despite the fact that SV has a long history of highly successful companies being started by dropouts and other kinds of "miscreants".
That's just a myth based on a few selective cases, which even count people like Zuckerberg with a Stanford education or Bill Gates as "drop-outs" because they didn't finish their degrees.
Besides, a founder can be of any potential background as they are not to answer to anybody else nor do they have to have any specific technical skills (a DB admin position however, or a data science one, does have to have them).
And even then, they are usually from well educated, well connected, and usually well white, backgrounds. I'm not so sure we want to take them as example of with which criteria to hire.
> > Maybe it is wrong that SV companies have proportionally more Asians than whites. Not "morally wrong", but wrong in the sense that Asian communities have optimized for certain metrics (tests, school performances, college aspirations) and SV companies have just gone along with what's in the pipeline.
> How is that wrong? Let the other communities optimize for those metrics too.
what if it's missing candidates that could do the job? what if the filter is using metrics that aren't actually the best proxy for what we're trying to optimize? you missed this part of the comment you were replying to:
> Despite the fact that SV has a long history of highly successful companies being started by dropouts and other kinds of "miscreants".
which is basically to say, after being (rightfully, i think) enamored with silicon valley's love of ability over credentials... why go back to just cargo-culting over credentials?
> And if those other communities have a history of systemic oppression, poorly funded school districts, legal bias against them, etc, fix that too.
to me, that's what diversity initiatives and hard discussions like this are part of: fixing the effects of historic systemic oppression. lots of other fronts on which that can be attacked, but no reason not to try to do it here too.
>what if it's missing candidates that could do the job? what if the filter is using metrics that aren't actually the best proxy for what we're trying to optimize?
That's for the company to decide, and not "wrong". At worst, it might be ineffective.
>to me, that's what diversity initiatives and hard discussions like this are part of: fixing the effects of historic systemic oppression.
For me they try to fix at the wrong level (like using a bandage to stop internal bleeding instead of fixing the cause) and thus cause more problems than they solve.
OK, but this situation literally never exists in the real world. Even if two candidates have 10 years of professional Python experience, there is going to be a more granular metric you use to figure out who has more technical skill. Maybe candidate A has more experience in Python 2.7 -- what Google still uses primarily for internal Python, and so candidate A gets hired.
But nothing in life is that simple. What if Candidate B has just 1 year less experience in Python 2.7x, and Candidate A has a domestic violence felony on their record? What is the optimal, objective decision then? Or consider a less dramatic example of "cultural" issues. Candidate A has 11 years in Python experience, Candidate B has 10 years. But Candidate A casually throws around the phrase "bitch work" and uses "faggy" and "retarded" as synonyms for "unfair" and "stupid", but is otherwise just as decent a person as B (however that is objectively measured). And let's imagine that this doesn't actually violate any HR policies.
Is it objectively correct to hire Candidate A on the basis of technical achievement? What if Candidate A is going to work with a female boss and several engineers who are LGBT? You think that Candidate A's extra year of Python experience objectively outweighs the damage that he would do team cohesion?
I'll humor you with your unrealistic scenario: OK, 2 completely equal candidates. And I'm playing devil's advocate for the diversity folks. You think that diversity advocates -- all things being exactly equal -- are obligated by their philosophy to choose the black candidate on the basis of being black? I sure as hell wouldn't make that rationalization, because that fits the legal definition of discrimination. Someone who is a diversity advocate can also be someone who isn't a federal law violator.
So how would I resolve it? Flip a coin -- that's no more absurd a solution than the entire scenario in the first place. What would be your hypothetical solution?
>So how would I resolve it? Flip a coin -- that's no more absurd a solution than the entire scenario in the first place. What would be your hypothetical solution?
If the 2 candidates are completely equal, then sure, flip a coin. Many managers do something like it already, even if it's just to hire among e.g. white candidates.
Besides, the examples I find somewhat contrived. How about "fuck team cohesion" which is a euphemism for "hiring like-minded hipsters/brogrammers/etc", and just get the technically better programmer (or flip coin if equal).
The team can cohese itself just fine. At worst, those others in the team, will have to learn that society is not just people who behave and talk just like them, but all kinds. That's an even better boost to real diversity (not just race/gender diversity, but diversity of opinions and character traits and walks-of-life, which matter even more).
Any time there are metrics for success, there is potential for unhealthy incentives to arise in a system, which results in an overall decrease in whatever the metrics were supposed to optimize for. If this is the premise, then having other communities optimize for the metrics is not going to result in a positive outcome for Silicon Valley or society in general.
Test scores were seen as a fairly efficient way to determine academic skill and intelligence. Obedience to school authority is seen as a metric for character. Also, being penalized by school authorities makes it significantly harder to be an active participant/leader in school activities, which is seen as an important metric for well-roundedness, talent, etc.
Imagine how much of SV wouldn't exist today if the prevailing mindset -- in society and among venture capitalists -- was that a good-tier college degree was an important metric for tech workers and entrepreneurs. Not to sound like Peter Thiel here (and admittedly, showing some serious survivor bias here in this line of reasoning) but SV has shown that huge success can be made from folks who didn't go through formal college. Would Steve Jobs and Steve Woz even be taken seriously as entrepreneurs in today's environment, where college degrees are significantly more common than they were in the 60s and 70s?
> And if those other communities have a history of systemic oppression, poorly funded school districts, legal bias against them, etc, fix that too.
This has been an ongoing fight for decades. You think SV should wait on political overhaul before making decisions regarding optimization of their workforce>
>but SV has shown that huge success can be made from folks who didn't go through formal college
From all industries I know of, SV is probably the poorest example of that, close to medicine for needing a degree to get anywhere in fancy SV companies.
Commerce, the hospitality, the restaurant business, and tons of others are way ahead in that regard...
Besides, shouldn't we demand more engineering and computer science, and less ad-hoc crap and reinvention of the wheel from self-taught programmers?
More Xerox Park and Bell Labs, and DEC, and SUN, and SGI, and so on, that is, and less "dropout that builds some social BS app"?
> From all industries I know of, SV is probably the poorest example of that, close to medicine for needing a degree to get anywhere in fancy SV companies.
You must not be familiar with journalism, which has a long storied history of amazing journalists who never went to college. Today, it is nearly impossible to land any kind of internship without a college degree, or some other extreme qualifications (being very wealthy, or from a very important family). I think it's a function of the commonality of a college degree and the significant reduction of available jobs in journalism.
> Besides, shouldn't we demand more engineering and computer science, and less ad-hoc crap and reinvention of the wheel from self-taught programmers?
As someone with a CompEng degree myself, I'm not going to argue with you against the benefits of an engineering degree. And I won't make an argument based on the existence of Woz (a college dropout who managed to be a stellar self-taught engineer and programmer). And there are obviously successful SV startups that have been started by people with formal educations, as well as complete disasters from dropouts (e.g. Theranos). But you think the main driver of innovation in SV is coding/engineering aptitude and discipline?
> And if those other communities have a history of systemic oppression, poorly funded school districts, legal bias against them, etc, attempt to fix that too (which would be even more important for the community overall than getting more people from the community to work in some specific industry).
Sorry, but arguing "but a much bigger problem elsewhere in society should be fixed first" seems like such a non sequitur. No one is saying that SV hiring of minorities alone would fix the systematic barriers. But it doesn't logically follow that these problems can be approached concurrently if there are already qualified minorities in the pipeline.
> That's just a myth based on a few selective cases, which even count people like Zuckerberg with a Stanford education or Bill Gates as "drop-outs" because they didn't finish their degrees.
The definition of a "drop out" is generally believed to be someone who enrolls in school in a degree program but didn't get the degree. What other definition of "drop out" did you have in mind?
You're right a founder can be whatever they want to be. How about a founder who manages to attract venture capital investment? My comment specifically referred to a scenario in which a college degree suddenly became an important metric of validation in society, such that VC would be more reluctant to go with a founder who didn't have the institutional validation of a degree (it could be seen as a sign of poor discipline and focus, for example).
> And even then, they are usually from well educated, well connected, and usually well white, backgrounds. I'm not so sure we want to take them as example of with which criteria to hire.
OK, so you agree that it's possible for people to get a boost into SV (and anywhere else) based on factors beyond their control (being born into wealthy/white/well-connected fmaily)?
But you say "going with what's in the pipeline", that basically means "hiring on average the best/mean candidates according to their metrics that apply".
To say that they shouldn't do that you basically have two options:
Say that they should discriminate and hire candidates that will be worse on average by their metrics, in the name of social justice,
Say that their metrics are wrong and they should adapt them.
I'd probably accept the second statement but that has to be a complicated and difficult thing to do.
> But you say "going with what's in the pipeline", that basically means "hiring on average the best/mean candidates according to their metrics that apply".
> To say that they shouldn't do that you basically have two options: Say that they should discriminate and hire candidates that will be worse on average by their metrics, in the name of social justice,
> Say that their metrics are wrong and they should adapt them.
> I'd probably accept the second statement but that has to be a complicated and difficult thing to do.
would you accept the second statement and then also accept the status quo because figuring out better metrics is complicated and difficult? would it be better to keep getting bad answers and perpetuating old injustices because the alternative is difficult reform work?
I think that there's an implicit assumption that there's a massive injustice, and that those things are most defined by race/gender and not, for example, parental income. In my limited personal experience of social justice measures you just give ethnic minority private school girls yet another leg up whilst working class white men get absolutely no chance (competing against all the rich white men, then placed at a disadvantage against everyone else).
I definitely accept the second statement, I think almost everyone does. Damore had it in his memo. Noone is against behind the curtain auditions kind of measures, but far more people than would be willing to admit it publically are very much against quotas, or positive discrimination, or whatever the current PC term is for giving someone a job on the basis of their skin colour/gender and a perceived social injustice.
fwiw, i think there are many ethnic minority private school girls who have just about as much working against them in total as a working class white guy. parental income is definitely a huge factor, maybe bigger than any other. but i would not agree that it is far and away a bigger deal than race. i think depending on where a person is, a black person can, because of their skin color, be in a much more precarious position than a white person with a smaller bank account (yes, even in 2017, and while it's gotten much better, i think it's still a huge problem, and there is statistical evidence to back up that assertion).
also consider that people (of all races) may attend private schools on scholarship. i would have to dig up a citation for this, but my recollection is that kids who go to good schools and get good jobs and all are still at a disadvantage relative to their peers who did the same but who have some inherited wealth or who generally come from a higher income bracket. this is one of the ways in which it's statistically advantageous to be white: inherited wealth makes it hard for historical discrimination to not be seriously self-perpetuating.
> but far more people than would be willing to admit it publically are very much against quotas, or positive discrimination, or whatever the current PC term is for giving someone a job on the basis of their skin colour/gender and a perceived social injustice.
does this sort of positive discrimination happen much? i mean, i think race can reasonably be considered one of the adverse circumstances to use when e.g. framing a person's college application for consideration. similarly, i'd say a white working class kid definitely has disadvantages that a well off black kid doesn't (but likewise, a woman has disadvantages that neither of them has, and realistically, the well off black kid has disadvantages that the working class white kid doesn't). but to get back to your original point, can you point to research that shows that there is effective positive discrimination for minorities in any general private industry or even government context? or, some major organization that practices that approach to the detriment of white male applicants, or to the detriment of the product or service they offer? because i am aware of a lot of research that says there is effectively the usual old style racial discrimination against minority candidates. so your point here feels like a straw-man to me.
> Say that they should discriminate and hire candidates that will be worse on average by their metrics, in the name of social justice
If Google sends as many recruiters to Howard University as they do to Stanford and Berkeley, and those recruiters only bring back the candidates who meet the same standards as those for Stanford and Berkeley, how is that discrimination.
(again, I disclose that I'm affiliated with Stanford, but have no idea about admissions or recruiting. Maybe Google does send as many or more recruiters to Howard U than it does to Stanford. I apologize for using it as a hypothetical example if that is indeed the case.)
It's possible to look at this the other way. For something that is supposed to be such a great employment, it sure has it's downsides. I'm starting to think it's inherent in the type of work, much like the stereotypes you know of accountants. Maybe not working as a coder is a sign your priorities are right.
Part of it is that you need an insane amount of focus to be good at coding, and very few people have that and other skills like people skills (and if they do, there's plenty of other well-paying opportunities). That coupled with an understanding of technology (which most people think is magic) is actually pretty alienating. Hope you have some hobbies, otherwise you'll be socialising with "like-minded" people.
So maybe articles could also focus on the downsides, like they do with e.g. oil and gas jobs. I know I wouldn't have chosen this career if I had known. Not sure why we're trying to push so many people into tech. Sure, some technical proficiency is good, but knowing how to code is like knowing semi-conductor fabrication - irrelevant for actually using an iPhone.
> For something that is supposed to be such a great employment, it sure has it's downsides
Look, I agree with the sentiment. But it's easy to have this sentiment after you've lived it ("the grass is always greener", etc) and even if you didn't like it, you still enjoyed a level of financial stability in those years (nevermind the prestige that will help you land jobs elsewhere) that many people would envy. Maybe folks who are in the currently underrepresented groups will soon have the same loathing but the difference is that right now -- as the OP argues, evidently -- these folks don't get that choice.
And we don't need to see diversity in tech as being just a way of restorative justice (as if that was SV's job). The argument for diversity in the workforce is that SV's userbase is diverse. And people from different backgrounds (not just racial, of course, but racial diversity is currently deficient) allows a SV company to be more innovative and successful to the bottom-line.
In other words, a coder's benefits to a company's bottom line is not solely based on coding skill or achievement. Was Mark Zuckerberg really the best PHP programmer of his generation?
> you still enjoyed a level of financial stability in those years [...] these folks don't get that choice.
I keep forgetting how much it pays in the US. But agreed, if I was deprived of a way to make heaps of money directly out of university I'd be mildly annoyed. (Arguably by not being American, I kind of was. And this goes without saying, but since it's the Internet, I'm not trying to argue that this "injustice" is the same as the alleged racism.)
---
I'm also involved with hiring people. Am I racist? I don't know, I only get the coding challenges without names. I do know that 95% of the applicants are shit, and most can't even be bothered with the coding "challenge" (on par with fizz buzz, it's mainly a test of do you have basic reading comprehension). Having a CS degree is meaningless as far as quality goes. So what I can relate to is that the university sucks at preparing people for the job. And the article does say that, but that's not the main focus.
So going back to first principles. Why is the title "Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?", and not "Man with industry experience is shocked to find University curriculum 25 years out of date", or "Universities hate us: This one trick to get hired"?
We should expect that hiring science improves over time if, in fact, the difference between the top talent and 2nd-tier talent really matters that much to firm success.
And if tests, school performance, college aspirations are interesting things, then we should continue to improve our pedagogical craft, and we should continue encouraging youth to pursue college, as opposed to dropout. Not everyone can benefit from the Peter Thiel method. Examination has its bad parts, such as deviance from ground facts, but the lack of examination is even less grounded in empiricism. That is surely where dishonest thrives best, where wishy washy arguments dominate.
We discuss competency because meritocracy is a counterbalance to nepotism, and meritocracy has a really nasty edge to it even if performed ideally. We often talk about how meritocracy could be done better, as implied when we criticize instruments such as tests, but even an ideal meritocracy retains a very harsh edge to it -- it bears moral judgment on the incompetent.
Also buried underneath in implication is the idea that there's a sizable group of intellectuals who are stomped on by school, and they have Facebook in the garage potential (but not Elon Musk potential).
I might suggest that processes that produce Elon Musks and Steve Jobs are mysterious, and criticizing education in favor of throwing thousands of kids into a black box creative process, hoping that Elon Musks and Steve Jobs come out, is a thinking even more cruel than unrestrained meritocracy.
Our system would have been elite in a historical perspective, basically offering calculus in high school to just about any child in the US if they could take it. In today's terms, it's not so obvious why the American employee is that much better than a British or German engineer. Or at the university level, why an American student would be that much better. If anything, Americans have been routinely trounced on international math competitions.
Rather than diminishing our education system in favor of black box hopes for more Steve Jobs (How many thousands of kids does it take to make a Steve Jobs? How many Steve Jobs are there per Apples?), I would hope we identify and improve gaps in education, and not throw out the art of examination.
Probably gonna get eaten alive here but the easiest explanation (Ockham's Razor) are differences in IQ distributions.
The article propagates this "white supremacy" narrative when in fact Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are vastly overrepresented taking into account the relative population numbers
The average sub-saharan IQ is around 70, the SD 15. If I remember correctly an average coder is something like 110-115 IQ. That is about 3xSD above the average for African blacks which means that about only 0.3% of them are fit for this kind of job.
African Americans have had western cultural innovation on lock-down for at least the past 100 years, and IQ was cooked-up by by a field of "science" that can't even reproduce its own seminal papers.
> African Americans have had western cultural innovation on lock-down for at least the past 100 years
African Americans (which are mulatto btw) constitute to a very small percentage of blacks in the world. And while the importance can discussed all those cultural innovations were built upon western (white) accomplishments. There is almost none signifact scientific/cultural innovations that came form Africa.
> and IQ was cooked-up by by a field of "science" that can't even reproduce its own seminal papers
IQ study is the most well-researched and studied branch of Psychometry and usual attemps at "disproval" are centered around bogus arguments around enviroment being the dominant factor (where study finds that 50%-80% of it is genetic)
Totally an argument when "statistics" frequently just means, "I put my small sample size of confounded variables in Excel and ran the stat functions."
>> There is almost none signifact scientific/cultural innovations that came form Africa.
You mean people living in undeveloped countries aren't going to be on the forefront of cultural innovation? I'm shocked.
>> IQ study is the most well-researched and studied branch of Psychometry and usual attemps at "disproval" are centered around bogus arguments around enviroment being the dominant factor (where study finds that 50%-80% of it is genetic)
Never even addressed nature vs nurture. I'm sure if any other bunch of quacks spent a hundred years tweaking a test to predict their idea of intelligence, I'm sure it would. I'd be less sure about it predicting the forms of intellect they failed to consider.
IQ strongly predicts academic success. Whatever other forms of intelligence it might be missing, are either unknown or don't correlate with academic success so strongly. Google is concerned with academic success and so IQ is also bound to be a strong predictor of hireability by Google. Maybe Kenyans are better at running but so what?
> And while the importance can discussed all those cultural innovations were built upon western (white) accomplishments
Western accomplishments, which mostly happened from the Reinassance onwards, became possible when:
1) Paper was introduced in Europe. Before that, printing a book would require "parchments" made out of sheep or goat skin. It would take in average 300 goats to print a bible.
2) The Church was influenced by philosophers such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and became more tolerant of science. Before that it would be considered blasphemy, apostasy or witchcraft.
3) A vast number of volumes of philosophical and scientific literature books was translated into Latin.
4) The introduction of better numerals and algebra.
Who is specifically responsible for that?
1) The Islamic Caliphate of Cordoba, in what today would be modern Spain. Specifically the Toledo School of Translators.
2) Refugees from fallen Constantinople carrying literature with them.
So, in short, the European Reinassance, the process that started the "white achievements" you mention, could not be possible if it wasn't because of the contributions of the Islamic civilization.
The follow up reaction to this is usually: if these guys were so advanced, what happened to them? Two things: Spanish Reconquista, and a massive invasion by the Mongol empire which razed all their cities, agriculture, irrigation, infrastructure, and killed all the scholars.
Knowledge is an uninterrupted chain of teachers and students and a missing generation is enough to kill it.
If I recall correctly, most of the big IQ-related results are unfortunately pretty heavily replicated. The results that have major replication issues are stuff like stereotype threat - which is to say, ideas that often go hand-in-hand with the belief that IQ is a racist lie.
I don't want to paint an entire profession as a dodge any more than I already have... Still going to take anything they "replicate" with a grain of salt.
You'll be consumed alive and rightfully so. The easiest explanation is culture (that is, assuming the facts are there to explain, which I did not verify).
Are you saying that it's right to stifle ideas because they're difficult or or people will be abused for sharing them? That's enforcing your culture on people. Why not let arguments stand or fall on their own without the need to attack the people making them?
Culture is often promoted as the explanation precisely because it's easy. That doesn't make it right.
Only if you learnt about the topic from popular politically correct culture. The relationship between race and IQ has been well established in psychology for almost as long as IQ has existed. They can't seem to stop testing it again and again. There have been studies controlling for culture, income, country's level of development, all sorts. But race still remains significant. Some of those other factors are too, since average African IQ is lower than African American.
And there are reasons for that. There might be a genetic component, but before going there consider:
- nutrition
- access to clean water
- pollution
- exposure to lead, arsenic, etc.
Some people argue that there are SNP markers associated with higher IQ that are not present in African populations. The problem with that argument is that not all of those SNPs have been found.
Read the studies, do You think they pick some random kids dying of hunger? Many of those tested are middle-class african students that have access to all those things.
An average African student has an average IQ of 85, which is one SD from the average. This is in line with whites where the average student is about 110-115 which is one SD from the average
IQ of 100 is defined as the mean IQ, and as such it is always moving. The trend is that the mean IQ is rising. But that trend has been delayed in some countries.
All the factors I mentioned have an impact in IQ. Two more concrete examples:
- Nutrition-wise, it is not only about hunger. The addition of iodine in food such as tablet salt, has improved Western IQ by about 15 points. In contrast, iodine deficiency is a problem present in Africa.
- Leaded fuel for example had a negative impact on the brain and has been found to affect IQ negatively. Only recently Africa has been transitioning out of leaded fuel.
Now, if you are going to be taking a random sample that is representative of a population, everyone within that population has the same probability of being sampled, so the "random kids" you mentioned could perfectly be sampled, and if they're significant in their population that might be reflected in the sample as well.
I am from Africa. I can say first-hand that most aren't interested in scientific and technological pursuits. However, I can make the same claim for white people. The difference between us is access to great education and resources. I was fortunate enough to grow in a wealthy family and have access a great education. This African "middle-class" you speak of is almost non-existent please care to check for Th GDP per capita of most African nations and dare say THAT is not lower than the norm.
Humans evolved there. The conditions there are better than the rest of the world, not worse. The only reason we have nutrition and access to clean water in other parts is because we invented the technology to provide that.
Unfortunately this is one of those areas where logic does not apply. This comment has been downvoted because it upsets people, not because it doesn't provide a reasonable theory. It will probably be removed soon when it upsets a person with that power. The funny thing is, I guarantee that none of the upset people have actually been to sub-Saharan Africa.
OK, maybe I'm reading this wrong, but this is a study about the IQ of sub-Saharan Africans? Did I miss the part in Bloomberg article that talked about how SV needs to hire more citizens of Ghana? The OP seems to entirely focus on SV's employment of African Americans. What does this study of sub-Sahara African have to do with the discussion?
Tonnes of kids from great CS programs apply to jobs at Google/Facebook/Pinterest/etc, the reality is that it is difficult to secure a job at these companies straight out of college.
Call me ignorant, but I don't think race is the reason why black coders aren't given a chance at these companies. All these companies are looking to "diversify" their workforce (they even have teams focused on this issue!), they are just having trouble finding quality talent within non-represented groups.
It’s essential to take such articles with grain of salt, because the „empowering black people” problem exists mostly in US/UK. It’s surreal to work in low cost center of American company somewhere in developing contry being paid and treated like shit, then one opens the company’s intranet and sees articles like „we empower black Americans!”. I couldn’t care less. There are awful culture problems in the industry, yes, but they have very litte to do with hiring or not hiring black Americans.
That fall, when Facebook’s Williams came to campus with colleagues, the visit didn’t go over well. In a meeting with students, one Facebook employee brought up diversity so often that students say they felt uncomfortable—as if she wanted to talk only about the color of their skin and not programming. The event had been advertised as focused on diversity, but students had been eager to talk about jobs
Is it so damn hard to understand that selecting skilled people based on their physiology rather than their abilities, is extremely offensive and demeaning?
Yes there are many who will say nothing and take the job (a salary is a salary after all) but I don't know if there's a skilled person out there who wouldn't feel disrespected
>Is it so damn hard to understand that selecting skilled people based on their physiology rather than their abilities, is extremely offensive and demeaning?
It's the BS idea that you can fix a root-level problem downstream.
Blacks face systematic oppression, poorly funded school districts, median poor households partly resulting from a century of segregation, redlining, less options, legal bias, etc?
Fuck that, just force companies to hire more of them. Problem fixed /s
Seeing comments like yours today on this Bloomberg piece is quite reassuring.
I technically count as a "minority" and I have no other way of phrasing this: it is extremely irritating to see companies push for diversity by hiring based on skin colour or gender.
Luckily, I live in a country that strongly opposes these kinds of policies, so I get to feel proud of my (very modest) achievements in this field.
To see these students and other minorities never being able to experience that feeling makes me quite sad.
I don't think anyone fresh out of college could afford to live there, not even in a shared house.
When are the big SV companies doing what's right and creating new offices in other cities where there's talented developers that can't afford to move to / live in SV and/or its shit conditions?
Everyone I know who got a job out of college in SV/SF got at least a 100k total comp package (usually more). Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and all of the bigger companies offer ~150k total comp or more to new grads. That said, some start-ups definitely do pay less, but it's not so bad that you can't at least get a room mate.
The same reason they don't like hiring women coders and coders over 30 (because of ageism). They use "culture fit" to shield them from diversity.
I hate to be cynical, though. It's just that I know too much about how tech companies operate. There's no doubt in my mind that there are more black coders working now than there were when I got into this industry, and that's a good thing. They just don't have much visibility now, but I think that too will change. Baby steps...
> "Silicon Valley is rife with Stanford and MIT graduates who started coding during childhood, won programming competitions in their spare time, and spent their summers interning at startups. At Howard, few of Pratt’s students fit that profile."
> "None had programmed before college."
I think these two quotes answer the headline question.
Specifically, give one group of people a 4+ year head start in the field in addition to engaging in activities that will build confidence for the person when engaging in those activities (e.g., participating in and/or winning programming competitions in high school), is it really a surprise that the less-experienced group is grossly underrepresented in hiring?
To make the above comparison not about race, how well are low-SES white people represented in Silicon Valley? Probably at equally low proportion for similar reasons -- they just don't have the same amount of experience as the highly competitive applicants.
What's the solution? Reach out to underrepresented populations and get them started on programming much earlier. It's expensive and time consuming, but it's totally doable.
Specifically, give one group of people a 4+ year head start in the field in addition to engaging in activities that will build confidence for the person when engaging in those activities (e.g., participating in and/or winning programming competitions in high school), is it really a surprise that the less-experienced group is grossly underrepresented in hiring?
I think the assumption that to qualify for employment in SV you need to hack full products in your garage, participate in coding/science school competitions and have a MIT/Stanford degree, doesn't hold under scrutiny
Agreed. It wasn't my comment -- just a summary of the article. I almost wrote a parenthetical in my original reply to the effect that I doubted the ubiquitousness of the first quote.
That said, I do think that the prior experience is a real issue. Rather than "winning programming competitions"or "hacking full projects in your garage", I do think it's safe to say that the vast majority of the folks who are competitive applicants to AppAmaGooFaceSoft started programming and were exposed directly or indirectly to CS ideas before they entered college. This may have been as simple as making a website for a school club (although frankly it was probably quite a bit more than that), but even actions as small as making a website open the door to a new world -- it is the beginning of the process of exploring new ideas and new problem spaces.
The answer to all of these questions are the same uncomfortable truths that people don't wish to admit:
* Classism
* Racism
* Sexism
* <other>-ism
The problems for the under-represented isn't just the end of the tunnel where people are quick to claim "But <insert minority> is not applying!"... it's the entire tunnel.
It's really hard to be a <insert non-cis white male> in tech. Because at every step there is an obstacle.
Those obstacles may be in your face (racism when you move to an area that is predominantly something else), or subtle things like you not being able to afford to live in SF because your minority doesn't have the implicit network strength of being the average white male and it's hard for you to find a place to live.
The average developer that you may have seen from a minority background has already overcome more obstacles than their peers. But importantly, the vast majority never made it so far. The obstacles reduced their numbers long before.
I look around at those who have made it, and the majority are white males from stable middle-class backgrounds. This stability and security, this confidence that a supportive family gives, this safety that a low-crime area brings, access to materials and space in which to learn, this reinforcement at every step that you are surrounded by "people like you" and that you deserve to be there... is such a huge thing that is taken for granted. If you're a white male in tech, consider whether you could have made it to where you are without all of that. Of course there are lots of individual exceptions (I spent 2.5 years sleeping rough and come from a background of poverty and abuse)... but by and large, this is your privilege and it is also why the numbers for <minority> aren't there.
For those that do make it... support them and help them. They've had it hard and deserve not just what they've achieved but more too.
> I look around at those who have made it, and the majority are white males from stable middle-class backgrounds. This stability and security, this confidence that a supportive family gives, this safety that a low-crime area brings, access to materials and space in which to learn, this reinforcement at every step that you are surrounded by "people like you" and that you deserve to be there... is such a huge thing that is taken for granted.
You imply that white people are privileged because they're white, yet look at this sentence. It seems to me like poor white people _don't_ go into tech. Couldn't socioeconomic/cultural differences explain the discrepancies and not systemic racism/sexism/-ism?
Just because statistically more white people grow up middle class does _not_ mean that all white people are privileged. Acting like they are is discriminatory.
I'm black myself(although just African not American). Science and technology are my ethos. With that out of the way, I think that a major contributor is the prejudice and stereotypes deriving from both the black & white communities.
I'd be curious to see how the proportion of students hired into Google or FB from Howard compares to a normal school (not Stanford or MIT) with a CS program. Out of 30 students in the senior class, only 1 or 2 were hired on full time, which comes to be about 3-6%.
I'm more concerned about whether the other 95% of students are finding technology-related jobs at all. If not, that would be a bigger problem in my opinion.
I've thought about this a lot.
If we're going after the most affected, it's going to be inner city youths. They have a lesser chance of making it through a 4 year, because their support structure isn't there because of historical injustices.
K-12's can change their curriculum to focus more on tech for a specific type of application, instead of just "build an app, write node, learn python" generics. Especially if they can turn out talented students before HS graduation.
>Microcontrollers
>Auto Engine Management Systems
>Civil Infrastructure
>Utility Infrastructure
I know these are by and large not the 'sexy' pie in the sky stuff most 'hot' investors chase, but these are upper-middle class jobs that there is less competition in, and are actually vitally important, meaning they will be around longer than SNAP inc. I think with intensive focus, the people who are placed in these programs, their kids will be completing CS 4 years and competing for 'creative applications in the valley', but the foundations need to be built up first.
>Silicon Valley is rife with Stanford and MIT graduates who started coding during childhood, won programming competitions in their spare time
They've identified the problem..
Maybe fund a program to teach programming to economically disadvantaged kids? in 10 years, those kids will be on a little more level playing field.
131 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadNothing is more important than protecting "the culture". https://medium.com/@bchesky/dont-fuck-up-the-culture-597cde9...
The article above says that "Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.", but in fact means "same as us: young white/indian/asian boys".
"Culture" is a get out of jail free card that allows anyone to deny a job to anyone at all whilst sounding entirely credible and important.
If you really want diversity then you would require reasons for rejecting any candidate, but you're not allowed to say "they weren't a cultural fit".
I have mostly experience in London and there the landscape is extremely diverse. Why would any company not hire any ethnicity if they are good at what they do?
Triplebyte
Paysa
HackerRank
:)
I don't get why the blame is put on "silicon valley"; they don't have an obligation to provide work for everyone.
If you grew up not just white, but upper-middle class and above, how many black people, statistically speaking, are you regularly in contact with? Versus someone who grows up lower-income or in the inner city? Being relatively well-off, you have a statistically better chance of getting a better K-12 education, which leads to a better chance at a top-tier school, and then to a top-tier company. You eventually are in a position to make recommendations for hires, and statistically speaking, you know more qualified whites than you do blacks and Hispanics. Statistically speaking, at many companies, recommendations from current employers carry a lot of weight.
Over time, this statistical weighting of life experiences would lead to a mostly white/Asian workforce at a tech company. And no one in this process was ever thinking "No blacks".
So to actually get a workforce that includes a representative number of a disenfranchised minority group, you actively have to seek it out. If you are in Silicon Valley, you have to actively make the decision to fly out to Howard U to do recruiting instead of the much more rational and cost-efficient decision to base recruiting at Stanford and Berkeley.
I would probably add that a portion of these are temporary work visa holders (e.g: H-1B). If you get terminated under these visas you are out of status and need to leave the country.
Being on a temporary worker visa makes workers submissive and gives companies leverage over the employee.
I have a personal example of how a friendship helped me get a job. Out of college I didn't get any offers that I liked and was just hanging out at home (fwiw, a luxury that some disenfranchised groups are less likely to have). One of my friends had to decline her summer internship with late notice, but she told the manager to consider me.
I was qualified on paper. Given that it was such late notice, it probably made sense to just fly me in rather than restart the search. The interview went fine, and I was hired.
There is no way I would have gotten that internship if me and my friend weren't friends. Why? Because I'm pretty sure I applied to that company through the normal process and apparently I didn't make the cut. I did not do anything to suddenly become more of a qualified candidate between the time of that rejection and when they decided to give me a call, and yet I ended up with an internship that immediately led to a job and to which I've never really had a problem finding employment in the decade since.
As much as I like myself, I can think of plenty of classmates and friends who were harder-working and more experience and qualifications who had much harder professional paths. And I'm sure there are people who I don't know who are also more qualified than me.
So is my success "fair"? What does that word even mean? What is the most ideal form of "fair" hiring? The "best" candidate? Is there any company or profession in existence in which the definition of "best" doesn't immediately introduce a whole bunch of subjective factors. And if "best" is the priority, then how much is a company obligated to expand the geographical and chronological scope of their search to make absolutely sure they've found the best candidate possible?
There's huge diversity in IT, you're just too blinded by your ideology to see it. You are the problem with your black/white quotas. You think there's diversity/differences inborn in the skin color. And that kind of thinking is called racism.
Never worked in US, so hardly understanding the pathological obsession with political correctness there.
I once experienced this great environment, and even though I am now paid maybe 4x as much, this was by far, far, far the best working experience I ever had. The relationships from this period are still alive across whole (former) staff even after the company was bought 8 years ago by international corp and lost much of its mojo (and within few months tons of those great people left for jobs that weren't paid more).
As for the topic discussed, yeah just hire the best fit for hard and soft skills whatever the background, color of skin or native language. This is true equality, in mind and in action. Anybody expecting that spread across races/skin color/religion/whatever will be 100% matching that of general population is dangerously naive though
I don't believe this[1], and if it were true, it wouldn't make the situation much better. But the alternate hypothesis is that all of these companies are leaving money on the table. These companies like to play on the idea that people should enjoy their jobs, which is obviously ridiculous because it's work, but if you can fool people into believing it, you can get them to work overtime and you profit. If letting your employees be casually racist means you get 15% more work out of them at the cost of 15% of your hiring pool it's a win because you save on labor costs. A necessary presupposition of the exercise is that the employees can be swayed by appeals to tribal psychology -- support the team (company) -- which is also the basis of racism. It sounds stupid when I say "letting your employees be casually racist" but if I substitute "only hire League of Legends players" it's obvious what's going on. It just so happens that the culture associated with many forms of entertainment techies enjoy is toxic to minorities and tends to be less black/Latino and more white/Asian than America as a whole. And all these things are tied together in the patchwork of culture. The utility of this sort of cultural Tom Sawyering extends beyond tech; it's crucial to the armed forces, for example, but appealing to minorities had more upsides for the financial backers in that case, and the military has more control over the culture it instills in soldiers, whereas Google et al ride the wave of contemporary US nerd affectations.
[1] - okay, why not? There may be some culturally homogenous workplaces but it's not the norm in my experience. The lack of black people at tech companies probably is also related to the fact that they're in cities with fewer black people and depend heavily on referrals for hiring. But referrals depend on friendships which goes back to that culture of entertainment for nerds I was talking about.
That wasn't the question, it was whether race bias plays any large role in hirings as in the US, which in UK, Canada, nordic countries etc it doesn't, as it doesn't in the societies in general.
Can't speak for South Africa, Australia or NZ, far enough from Western Europe to be what I meant.
1. It's rather convenient for your argument, isn't it, that some of the aforementioned countries (the Scandinavian ones) don't have any substantial black population. So no need to correct race bias there...there aren't many black workers there! Nice job.
2. The UK actually does have a significant black population, and if you look at UK tech companies I think you'll see that they have close to the same percentage of black programmers as in the US.
Subsidiary point: being smug about supposed Euro superiority re: race bias in tech hiring and engaging in America bashing is a weak reed to lean on.
Well, the US also didn't have any history (as US) before 1942 or so, so of course it got populated by "more racially diverse" population -- not because of the benevolence and multiculturalism of people already living there, but because people came in from all corners, grabbed land, and established a new country (in the process giving the real native population the short end of the stick).
And despite that, the US had slaves long after European countries had abolished that practice, it had segregation long after Europe has done with it (which was rarely an issue here), and is still uptight about race in ways Europe isn't.
Let's not even get into how 25% of the world's prisoners are in the US that only has 4% of the world's total population -- and how many of them are black compared to the whites there.
That's what makes it "crazy about race as always".
>1. It's rather convenient for your argument, isn't it, that some of the aforementioned countries (the Scandinavian ones) don't have any substantial black population.
Well, sorry that Sweden didn't abduct and bought people from Africa so that it can now have more blacks... They do have a 5-7% of muslim immigrants, does that count?
And Europe is extremely uptight about Holocaust-related things in ways that America isn't. This isn't surprising; we should expect laws and norms to be directly affected by a country's history.
That the U.S. was, as you point out, a latecomer to the abolition and desegregation, would seem to justify the U.S. being more "uptight" (some would say, "vigilant") about racial discrimination issues. Why should that be seen as being "crazy about race"?
Germany perhaps. Most of Europe, not.
>That the U.S. was, as you point out, a latecomer to the abolition and desegregation, would seem to justify the U.S. being more "uptight" (some would say, "vigilant") about racial discrimination issues. Why should that be seen as being "crazy about race"?
Because the US still has a thing for race, in a degree and a way that western european countries don't.
Not just being "uptight" but active redlining, active huge overrepresentation of blacks in jail, active police open season on blacks, active open racism and much more.
That is incorrect. US history begins in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. And before it was a federation of States, people had been there homesteading when the territory was an English colony.
the US had slaves long after European countries had abolished that practice
That is also incorrect. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 due to the efforts of Wilberforce, et al. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1865. That's a little over 30 years, hardly a "long time" even for a country less than a century old. That's not even one full generation.
I dunno man, I think I'll take US "uptightness" any day over the English version of "uptight." And I say that as someone whose grandparents were British subjects!
Not even technically (although I did mean 1492). The fact that US history begins in 1776 doesn't make the fact that US doesn't have a history before 1492 untrue. If anything, it makes it even stronger: it not only didn't have a history, it didn't even exist for another 3 centuries or so.
In any case, I was referring to the whole history of the now-US settlements, no just the history of the US as a state.
>That is also incorrect. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 due to the efforts of Wilberforce, et al. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1865. That's a little over 30 years, hardly a "long time" even for a country less than a century old.
I spoke of "other European countries". You only mentioned one, the British Empire, and even itself abolished slavery 30 years before the US. Others did it much earlier. So much for being some shining beacon of freedom. Besides, even 1833 is the date for the British Empire at large. In the UK slavery was abolished much earlier still.
It's like every smart kid who knows something about computers is chomping at the bit to become a mercenary-in-training for soulless megacorps, and their keepers are every bit as gung-ho on making that happen.
Instead of making overtures to Google and Facebook, they should be making the next big thing that kicks them square in the nuts. If anyone from Howard University is reading this, get started on it. I believe in you.
That's not true. Whites are underrepresented at Silicon Valley companies compared to their share of the US population. Asians are massively, massively over represented. Why?
There is no way to answer the question without opening the can of worms that is test scores, IQ, etc. So instead of being honest, the story paints a politically convenient narrative that is not actually true.
Just the large number of people in Asia (4.4 Billion) and a selection filter is a simpler explanation.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/
Unless you want to call that pseudoscience as well.
These "race realists" claim they have a good way to scientifically measure IQ, and that IQ is really important and then propose solutions that don't involve measuring IQ, but rather looking at people's skin color.
It's a somewhat transparent bait and switch (or mott and bailey).
If there is a culture that breeds better self-control, better long-term goal attainment, and greater consideration for other people, doesn't it make sense that it would be a culture that does better than others?
Isn't that an even simpler explanation?
This is obviously not the whole story though. Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims from pre-partition Punjab are little different genetically apart from way higher Muslim inbreeding. IIRC all three groups outperform native Britons though and they’re mostly the descendants of peasants. Some likely very large portion of Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi educational underperformance is terrible education systems. There’s a great section in Poor Economics, Esther Duflo and Abhijit Bannerjee on education in the developing world, covering Kenya and India among others. It’s mostly crap.
So these SV companies should alter their recruiting process so that their hiring pool isn't basically a mirror of Stanford's application pool. (full disclosure: I'm Asian. I also work at Stanford. I also play no part in Stanford admissions and probably have less clue about it than the average outsider)
That's fair enough. So what's wrong with making an effort to examine the ways that the SV hiring process systematically -- but not intentionally or maliciously -- filters out blacks, Hispanics, and women from engineering positions?
How is that wrong? Let the other communities optimize for those metrics too.
And if those other communities have a history of systemic oppression, poorly funded school districts, legal bias against them, etc, attempt to fix that too (which would be even more important for the community overall than getting more people from the community to work in some specific industry).
>Despite the fact that SV has a long history of highly successful companies being started by dropouts and other kinds of "miscreants".
That's just a myth based on a few selective cases, which even count people like Zuckerberg with a Stanford education or Bill Gates as "drop-outs" because they didn't finish their degrees.
Besides, a founder can be of any potential background as they are not to answer to anybody else nor do they have to have any specific technical skills (a DB admin position however, or a data science one, does have to have them).
And even then, they are usually from well educated, well connected, and usually well white, backgrounds. I'm not so sure we want to take them as example of with which criteria to hire.
> How is that wrong? Let the other communities optimize for those metrics too.
what if it's missing candidates that could do the job? what if the filter is using metrics that aren't actually the best proxy for what we're trying to optimize? you missed this part of the comment you were replying to:
> Despite the fact that SV has a long history of highly successful companies being started by dropouts and other kinds of "miscreants".
which is basically to say, after being (rightfully, i think) enamored with silicon valley's love of ability over credentials... why go back to just cargo-culting over credentials?
> And if those other communities have a history of systemic oppression, poorly funded school districts, legal bias against them, etc, fix that too.
to me, that's what diversity initiatives and hard discussions like this are part of: fixing the effects of historic systemic oppression. lots of other fronts on which that can be attacked, but no reason not to try to do it here too.
That's for the company to decide, and not "wrong". At worst, it might be ineffective.
>to me, that's what diversity initiatives and hard discussions like this are part of: fixing the effects of historic systemic oppression.
For me they try to fix at the wrong level (like using a bandage to stop internal bleeding instead of fixing the cause) and thus cause more problems than they solve.
If two candidates have equal technical skills, color shouldn't matter at all, and "cultural fit" BS should not play a role.
But nothing in life is that simple. What if Candidate B has just 1 year less experience in Python 2.7x, and Candidate A has a domestic violence felony on their record? What is the optimal, objective decision then? Or consider a less dramatic example of "cultural" issues. Candidate A has 11 years in Python experience, Candidate B has 10 years. But Candidate A casually throws around the phrase "bitch work" and uses "faggy" and "retarded" as synonyms for "unfair" and "stupid", but is otherwise just as decent a person as B (however that is objectively measured). And let's imagine that this doesn't actually violate any HR policies.
Is it objectively correct to hire Candidate A on the basis of technical achievement? What if Candidate A is going to work with a female boss and several engineers who are LGBT? You think that Candidate A's extra year of Python experience objectively outweighs the damage that he would do team cohesion?
I'll humor you with your unrealistic scenario: OK, 2 completely equal candidates. And I'm playing devil's advocate for the diversity folks. You think that diversity advocates -- all things being exactly equal -- are obligated by their philosophy to choose the black candidate on the basis of being black? I sure as hell wouldn't make that rationalization, because that fits the legal definition of discrimination. Someone who is a diversity advocate can also be someone who isn't a federal law violator.
So how would I resolve it? Flip a coin -- that's no more absurd a solution than the entire scenario in the first place. What would be your hypothetical solution?
If the 2 candidates are completely equal, then sure, flip a coin. Many managers do something like it already, even if it's just to hire among e.g. white candidates.
Besides, the examples I find somewhat contrived. How about "fuck team cohesion" which is a euphemism for "hiring like-minded hipsters/brogrammers/etc", and just get the technically better programmer (or flip coin if equal).
The team can cohese itself just fine. At worst, those others in the team, will have to learn that society is not just people who behave and talk just like them, but all kinds. That's an even better boost to real diversity (not just race/gender diversity, but diversity of opinions and character traits and walks-of-life, which matter even more).
Test scores were seen as a fairly efficient way to determine academic skill and intelligence. Obedience to school authority is seen as a metric for character. Also, being penalized by school authorities makes it significantly harder to be an active participant/leader in school activities, which is seen as an important metric for well-roundedness, talent, etc.
Imagine how much of SV wouldn't exist today if the prevailing mindset -- in society and among venture capitalists -- was that a good-tier college degree was an important metric for tech workers and entrepreneurs. Not to sound like Peter Thiel here (and admittedly, showing some serious survivor bias here in this line of reasoning) but SV has shown that huge success can be made from folks who didn't go through formal college. Would Steve Jobs and Steve Woz even be taken seriously as entrepreneurs in today's environment, where college degrees are significantly more common than they were in the 60s and 70s?
> And if those other communities have a history of systemic oppression, poorly funded school districts, legal bias against them, etc, fix that too.
This has been an ongoing fight for decades. You think SV should wait on political overhaul before making decisions regarding optimization of their workforce>
From all industries I know of, SV is probably the poorest example of that, close to medicine for needing a degree to get anywhere in fancy SV companies.
Commerce, the hospitality, the restaurant business, and tons of others are way ahead in that regard...
Besides, shouldn't we demand more engineering and computer science, and less ad-hoc crap and reinvention of the wheel from self-taught programmers?
More Xerox Park and Bell Labs, and DEC, and SUN, and SGI, and so on, that is, and less "dropout that builds some social BS app"?
You must not be familiar with journalism, which has a long storied history of amazing journalists who never went to college. Today, it is nearly impossible to land any kind of internship without a college degree, or some other extreme qualifications (being very wealthy, or from a very important family). I think it's a function of the commonality of a college degree and the significant reduction of available jobs in journalism.
> Besides, shouldn't we demand more engineering and computer science, and less ad-hoc crap and reinvention of the wheel from self-taught programmers?
As someone with a CompEng degree myself, I'm not going to argue with you against the benefits of an engineering degree. And I won't make an argument based on the existence of Woz (a college dropout who managed to be a stellar self-taught engineer and programmer). And there are obviously successful SV startups that have been started by people with formal educations, as well as complete disasters from dropouts (e.g. Theranos). But you think the main driver of innovation in SV is coding/engineering aptitude and discipline?
Sorry, but arguing "but a much bigger problem elsewhere in society should be fixed first" seems like such a non sequitur. No one is saying that SV hiring of minorities alone would fix the systematic barriers. But it doesn't logically follow that these problems can be approached concurrently if there are already qualified minorities in the pipeline.
> That's just a myth based on a few selective cases, which even count people like Zuckerberg with a Stanford education or Bill Gates as "drop-outs" because they didn't finish their degrees.
The definition of a "drop out" is generally believed to be someone who enrolls in school in a degree program but didn't get the degree. What other definition of "drop out" did you have in mind?
You're right a founder can be whatever they want to be. How about a founder who manages to attract venture capital investment? My comment specifically referred to a scenario in which a college degree suddenly became an important metric of validation in society, such that VC would be more reluctant to go with a founder who didn't have the institutional validation of a degree (it could be seen as a sign of poor discipline and focus, for example).
> And even then, they are usually from well educated, well connected, and usually well white, backgrounds. I'm not so sure we want to take them as example of with which criteria to hire.
OK, so you agree that it's possible for people to get a boost into SV (and anywhere else) based on factors beyond their control (being born into wealthy/white/well-connected fmaily)?
To say that they shouldn't do that you basically have two options: Say that they should discriminate and hire candidates that will be worse on average by their metrics, in the name of social justice,
Say that their metrics are wrong and they should adapt them.
I'd probably accept the second statement but that has to be a complicated and difficult thing to do.
> To say that they shouldn't do that you basically have two options: Say that they should discriminate and hire candidates that will be worse on average by their metrics, in the name of social justice,
> Say that their metrics are wrong and they should adapt them.
> I'd probably accept the second statement but that has to be a complicated and difficult thing to do.
would you accept the second statement and then also accept the status quo because figuring out better metrics is complicated and difficult? would it be better to keep getting bad answers and perpetuating old injustices because the alternative is difficult reform work?
I definitely accept the second statement, I think almost everyone does. Damore had it in his memo. Noone is against behind the curtain auditions kind of measures, but far more people than would be willing to admit it publically are very much against quotas, or positive discrimination, or whatever the current PC term is for giving someone a job on the basis of their skin colour/gender and a perceived social injustice.
also consider that people (of all races) may attend private schools on scholarship. i would have to dig up a citation for this, but my recollection is that kids who go to good schools and get good jobs and all are still at a disadvantage relative to their peers who did the same but who have some inherited wealth or who generally come from a higher income bracket. this is one of the ways in which it's statistically advantageous to be white: inherited wealth makes it hard for historical discrimination to not be seriously self-perpetuating.
> but far more people than would be willing to admit it publically are very much against quotas, or positive discrimination, or whatever the current PC term is for giving someone a job on the basis of their skin colour/gender and a perceived social injustice.
does this sort of positive discrimination happen much? i mean, i think race can reasonably be considered one of the adverse circumstances to use when e.g. framing a person's college application for consideration. similarly, i'd say a white working class kid definitely has disadvantages that a well off black kid doesn't (but likewise, a woman has disadvantages that neither of them has, and realistically, the well off black kid has disadvantages that the working class white kid doesn't). but to get back to your original point, can you point to research that shows that there is effective positive discrimination for minorities in any general private industry or even government context? or, some major organization that practices that approach to the detriment of white male applicants, or to the detriment of the product or service they offer? because i am aware of a lot of research that says there is effectively the usual old style racial discrimination against minority candidates. so your point here feels like a straw-man to me.
If Google sends as many recruiters to Howard University as they do to Stanford and Berkeley, and those recruiters only bring back the candidates who meet the same standards as those for Stanford and Berkeley, how is that discrimination.
(again, I disclose that I'm affiliated with Stanford, but have no idea about admissions or recruiting. Maybe Google does send as many or more recruiters to Howard U than it does to Stanford. I apologize for using it as a hypothetical example if that is indeed the case.)
Part of it is that you need an insane amount of focus to be good at coding, and very few people have that and other skills like people skills (and if they do, there's plenty of other well-paying opportunities). That coupled with an understanding of technology (which most people think is magic) is actually pretty alienating. Hope you have some hobbies, otherwise you'll be socialising with "like-minded" people.
So maybe articles could also focus on the downsides, like they do with e.g. oil and gas jobs. I know I wouldn't have chosen this career if I had known. Not sure why we're trying to push so many people into tech. Sure, some technical proficiency is good, but knowing how to code is like knowing semi-conductor fabrication - irrelevant for actually using an iPhone.
Look, I agree with the sentiment. But it's easy to have this sentiment after you've lived it ("the grass is always greener", etc) and even if you didn't like it, you still enjoyed a level of financial stability in those years (nevermind the prestige that will help you land jobs elsewhere) that many people would envy. Maybe folks who are in the currently underrepresented groups will soon have the same loathing but the difference is that right now -- as the OP argues, evidently -- these folks don't get that choice.
And we don't need to see diversity in tech as being just a way of restorative justice (as if that was SV's job). The argument for diversity in the workforce is that SV's userbase is diverse. And people from different backgrounds (not just racial, of course, but racial diversity is currently deficient) allows a SV company to be more innovative and successful to the bottom-line.
In other words, a coder's benefits to a company's bottom line is not solely based on coding skill or achievement. Was Mark Zuckerberg really the best PHP programmer of his generation?
I keep forgetting how much it pays in the US. But agreed, if I was deprived of a way to make heaps of money directly out of university I'd be mildly annoyed. (Arguably by not being American, I kind of was. And this goes without saying, but since it's the Internet, I'm not trying to argue that this "injustice" is the same as the alleged racism.)
---
I'm also involved with hiring people. Am I racist? I don't know, I only get the coding challenges without names. I do know that 95% of the applicants are shit, and most can't even be bothered with the coding "challenge" (on par with fizz buzz, it's mainly a test of do you have basic reading comprehension). Having a CS degree is meaningless as far as quality goes. So what I can relate to is that the university sucks at preparing people for the job. And the article does say that, but that's not the main focus.
So going back to first principles. Why is the title "Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?", and not "Man with industry experience is shocked to find University curriculum 25 years out of date", or "Universities hate us: This one trick to get hired"?
And if tests, school performance, college aspirations are interesting things, then we should continue to improve our pedagogical craft, and we should continue encouraging youth to pursue college, as opposed to dropout. Not everyone can benefit from the Peter Thiel method. Examination has its bad parts, such as deviance from ground facts, but the lack of examination is even less grounded in empiricism. That is surely where dishonest thrives best, where wishy washy arguments dominate.
We discuss competency because meritocracy is a counterbalance to nepotism, and meritocracy has a really nasty edge to it even if performed ideally. We often talk about how meritocracy could be done better, as implied when we criticize instruments such as tests, but even an ideal meritocracy retains a very harsh edge to it -- it bears moral judgment on the incompetent.
Also buried underneath in implication is the idea that there's a sizable group of intellectuals who are stomped on by school, and they have Facebook in the garage potential (but not Elon Musk potential).
I might suggest that processes that produce Elon Musks and Steve Jobs are mysterious, and criticizing education in favor of throwing thousands of kids into a black box creative process, hoping that Elon Musks and Steve Jobs come out, is a thinking even more cruel than unrestrained meritocracy.
Our system would have been elite in a historical perspective, basically offering calculus in high school to just about any child in the US if they could take it. In today's terms, it's not so obvious why the American employee is that much better than a British or German engineer. Or at the university level, why an American student would be that much better. If anything, Americans have been routinely trounced on international math competitions.
Rather than diminishing our education system in favor of black box hopes for more Steve Jobs (How many thousands of kids does it take to make a Steve Jobs? How many Steve Jobs are there per Apples?), I would hope we identify and improve gaps in education, and not throw out the art of examination.
But founders are not hired
Selection bias? Asian immigrants tend to be better educated and wealthier..and their kids have all the advantages in the world.
The average sub-saharan IQ is around 70, the SD 15. If I remember correctly an average coder is something like 110-115 IQ. That is about 3xSD above the average for African blacks which means that about only 0.3% of them are fit for this kind of job.
African Americans have had western cultural innovation on lock-down for at least the past 100 years, and IQ was cooked-up by by a field of "science" that can't even reproduce its own seminal papers.
Not an argument
> African Americans have had western cultural innovation on lock-down for at least the past 100 years
African Americans (which are mulatto btw) constitute to a very small percentage of blacks in the world. And while the importance can discussed all those cultural innovations were built upon western (white) accomplishments. There is almost none signifact scientific/cultural innovations that came form Africa.
> and IQ was cooked-up by by a field of "science" that can't even reproduce its own seminal papers
IQ study is the most well-researched and studied branch of Psychometry and usual attemps at "disproval" are centered around bogus arguments around enviroment being the dominant factor (where study finds that 50%-80% of it is genetic)
Totally an argument when "statistics" frequently just means, "I put my small sample size of confounded variables in Excel and ran the stat functions."
>> There is almost none signifact scientific/cultural innovations that came form Africa.
You mean people living in undeveloped countries aren't going to be on the forefront of cultural innovation? I'm shocked.
>> IQ study is the most well-researched and studied branch of Psychometry and usual attemps at "disproval" are centered around bogus arguments around enviroment being the dominant factor (where study finds that 50%-80% of it is genetic)
Never even addressed nature vs nurture. I'm sure if any other bunch of quacks spent a hundred years tweaking a test to predict their idea of intelligence, I'm sure it would. I'd be less sure about it predicting the forms of intellect they failed to consider.
e.g:
- dietary iodine affects your IQ positively
- exposure to lead (e.g: leaded fuel emissions), arsenic (e.g: from water) and pollution at a large affects your IQ negatively
Western accomplishments, which mostly happened from the Reinassance onwards, became possible when:
1) Paper was introduced in Europe. Before that, printing a book would require "parchments" made out of sheep or goat skin. It would take in average 300 goats to print a bible.
2) The Church was influenced by philosophers such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and became more tolerant of science. Before that it would be considered blasphemy, apostasy or witchcraft.
3) A vast number of volumes of philosophical and scientific literature books was translated into Latin.
4) The introduction of better numerals and algebra.
Who is specifically responsible for that?
1) The Islamic Caliphate of Cordoba, in what today would be modern Spain. Specifically the Toledo School of Translators.
2) Refugees from fallen Constantinople carrying literature with them.
So, in short, the European Reinassance, the process that started the "white achievements" you mention, could not be possible if it wasn't because of the contributions of the Islamic civilization.
The follow up reaction to this is usually: if these guys were so advanced, what happened to them? Two things: Spanish Reconquista, and a massive invasion by the Mongol empire which razed all their cities, agriculture, irrigation, infrastructure, and killed all the scholars.
Knowledge is an uninterrupted chain of teachers and students and a missing generation is enough to kill it.
What does this mean? I don't understand what "lock down" means (I'm British).
Culture is often promoted as the explanation precisely because it's easy. That doesn't make it right.
That is the kind of statement that really, really needs a citation.
- nutrition
- access to clean water
- pollution
- exposure to lead, arsenic, etc.
Some people argue that there are SNP markers associated with higher IQ that are not present in African populations. The problem with that argument is that not all of those SNPs have been found.
An average African student has an average IQ of 85, which is one SD from the average. This is in line with whites where the average student is about 110-115 which is one SD from the average
All the factors I mentioned have an impact in IQ. Two more concrete examples:
- Nutrition-wise, it is not only about hunger. The addition of iodine in food such as tablet salt, has improved Western IQ by about 15 points. In contrast, iodine deficiency is a problem present in Africa.
- Leaded fuel for example had a negative impact on the brain and has been found to affect IQ negatively. Only recently Africa has been transitioning out of leaded fuel.
Now, if you are going to be taking a random sample that is representative of a population, everyone within that population has the same probability of being sampled, so the "random kids" you mentioned could perfectly be sampled, and if they're significant in their population that might be reflected in the sample as well.
edit: saw further down in the thread that this was posted: http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/lynn2010.pdf
OK, maybe I'm reading this wrong, but this is a study about the IQ of sub-Saharan Africans? Did I miss the part in Bloomberg article that talked about how SV needs to hire more citizens of Ghana? The OP seems to entirely focus on SV's employment of African Americans. What does this study of sub-Sahara African have to do with the discussion?
Would it be that much of a shock, given pretty much every American industry is run by the same people?
Is it so damn hard to understand that selecting skilled people based on their physiology rather than their abilities, is extremely offensive and demeaning?
Yes there are many who will say nothing and take the job (a salary is a salary after all) but I don't know if there's a skilled person out there who wouldn't feel disrespected
It's the BS idea that you can fix a root-level problem downstream.
Blacks face systematic oppression, poorly funded school districts, median poor households partly resulting from a century of segregation, redlining, less options, legal bias, etc?
Fuck that, just force companies to hire more of them. Problem fixed /s
I technically count as a "minority" and I have no other way of phrasing this: it is extremely irritating to see companies push for diversity by hiring based on skin colour or gender.
Luckily, I live in a country that strongly opposes these kinds of policies, so I get to feel proud of my (very modest) achievements in this field.
To see these students and other minorities never being able to experience that feeling makes me quite sad.
When are the big SV companies doing what's right and creating new offices in other cities where there's talented developers that can't afford to move to / live in SV and/or its shit conditions?
I hate to be cynical, though. It's just that I know too much about how tech companies operate. There's no doubt in my mind that there are more black coders working now than there were when I got into this industry, and that's a good thing. They just don't have much visibility now, but I think that too will change. Baby steps...
> "None had programmed before college."
I think these two quotes answer the headline question.
Specifically, give one group of people a 4+ year head start in the field in addition to engaging in activities that will build confidence for the person when engaging in those activities (e.g., participating in and/or winning programming competitions in high school), is it really a surprise that the less-experienced group is grossly underrepresented in hiring?
To make the above comparison not about race, how well are low-SES white people represented in Silicon Valley? Probably at equally low proportion for similar reasons -- they just don't have the same amount of experience as the highly competitive applicants.
What's the solution? Reach out to underrepresented populations and get them started on programming much earlier. It's expensive and time consuming, but it's totally doable.
I think the assumption that to qualify for employment in SV you need to hack full products in your garage, participate in coding/science school competitions and have a MIT/Stanford degree, doesn't hold under scrutiny
That said, I do think that the prior experience is a real issue. Rather than "winning programming competitions"or "hacking full projects in your garage", I do think it's safe to say that the vast majority of the folks who are competitive applicants to AppAmaGooFaceSoft started programming and were exposed directly or indirectly to CS ideas before they entered college. This may have been as simple as making a website for a school club (although frankly it was probably quite a bit more than that), but even actions as small as making a website open the door to a new world -- it is the beginning of the process of exploring new ideas and new problem spaces.
to qualify - not. To increase chances of getting the employment in competitive environment (i.e. to get into FB/GOOG/etc.) - yes.
* Classism
* Racism
* Sexism
* <other>-ism
The problems for the under-represented isn't just the end of the tunnel where people are quick to claim "But <insert minority> is not applying!"... it's the entire tunnel.
It's really hard to be a <insert non-cis white male> in tech. Because at every step there is an obstacle.
Those obstacles may be in your face (racism when you move to an area that is predominantly something else), or subtle things like you not being able to afford to live in SF because your minority doesn't have the implicit network strength of being the average white male and it's hard for you to find a place to live.
The average developer that you may have seen from a minority background has already overcome more obstacles than their peers. But importantly, the vast majority never made it so far. The obstacles reduced their numbers long before.
I look around at those who have made it, and the majority are white males from stable middle-class backgrounds. This stability and security, this confidence that a supportive family gives, this safety that a low-crime area brings, access to materials and space in which to learn, this reinforcement at every step that you are surrounded by "people like you" and that you deserve to be there... is such a huge thing that is taken for granted. If you're a white male in tech, consider whether you could have made it to where you are without all of that. Of course there are lots of individual exceptions (I spent 2.5 years sleeping rough and come from a background of poverty and abuse)... but by and large, this is your privilege and it is also why the numbers for <minority> aren't there.
For those that do make it... support them and help them. They've had it hard and deserve not just what they've achieved but more too.
You imply that white people are privileged because they're white, yet look at this sentence. It seems to me like poor white people _don't_ go into tech. Couldn't socioeconomic/cultural differences explain the discrepancies and not systemic racism/sexism/-ism?
Just because statistically more white people grow up middle class does _not_ mean that all white people are privileged. Acting like they are is discriminatory.
I'm more concerned about whether the other 95% of students are finding technology-related jobs at all. If not, that would be a bigger problem in my opinion.
Companies want smart people.
They've identified the problem.. Maybe fund a program to teach programming to economically disadvantaged kids? in 10 years, those kids will be on a little more level playing field.