There was an article I came across where a black startup founder was frequently mistaken as a regular employee while his white co-worker was mistaken as the CEO. On multiple occasions the unaware person shook the hand of the white co-worker, ignored the true startup founder, and so on.
"Adding to the insult, [Will] Hayes finds himself at a distinct disadvantage in meetings that open with a case of mistaken identity. Venture capital is based on relationships, and investors aren’t typically primed to write a check when they feel unsettled. “You see it in the body language, you see it in the lack of questions and engagement,” says Hayes, 39. “They can’t wait for this meeting to get over.”
For nearly four years, Hayes would attend investor meetings alongside [longtime colleague] Messick, the former chief marketing officer at Lucidworks. VCs are trained to look for patterns in startup founders, Messick says, and there aren’t many Black Mark Zuckerbergs. 'Years and years of a Black guy and a White guy walking in the room, and the White guy is the CEO,' Messick says. 'Whether malicious, whether negligent, it was always awful.'"
I get the gist of your meaning, but many, if not most of the startups valued highest are started by a fairly homogeneous set. I think it has as much to do with social and business connections as it does with racism, which is to say it has an effect which is difficult to measure individually, but which is possible to quantify and aggregate.
So to answer your question in the manner in which it was posed:
Most or nearly all of the Zuckerbergs are non-Black?
You’re making a wild guess with no citation to any studies, but I’ll just go with it. I’d hazard a guess that the homogeneity you’re trying to reference is not limited to _racial_ or _gender_ homogeneity.
I think you’ve ignored the context of the article. He says that to mean he doesn’t look like he’s going to start the next Facebook or Twitter to VCs, because he is black. They will not entertain the idea that he COULD BE the next Mark Zuckerberg because he simply can’t “look the part”.
In a parallel dimension, Facebook’s CEO is Black. How would that have affected its trajectory? Would it be even better? Would be all be on Google+ still? Or would we all be on Twitter? What startups that exist now are those otherworldly challengers, or collaborators? Would Facebook’s API perhaps be more open if their CEO were of a different race? Depends on the person of course, but it is an interesting inside baseball hypothetical.
If Zuckerberg ever runs for public office, he’s going to get sued if he doesn’t put the CEO hat down while in office doing official duties.
I personally think he should run just so he’s forced to answer unscripted questions live on tv. Much like the upcoming Congressional inquiries. Very interesting times.
What argument are you trying to make here? In an ideal world it would make no difference whatsoever.
You say that about zuck running for office but you've got Trump in that exact seat right now. He's forced to answer unscripted questions on TV and it makes no difference whatsoever. None.
OP said there was one too many non-Black Zuckerbergs, which I took to mean the one we have was one too many, that is, they may prefer he were Black instead? I don’t know what they meant, I just steelmanned it. I agree that bias exists, and it would be better if it didn’t at all in any way, but markets price in bias as well as risk and other factors, likely racism too, unfortunately. Predicting investments of others via their sentiment toward individuals and other groups is an idea I just had, and I don’t even trade or own stocks. This seems elementary to me.
It will matter to Zuckerberg personally because he doesn’t seem to rate well with some people, which isn’t necessary, but helps you get elected, generally. He seems to really care what people think about him in a value-neutral “we’re all just talking” kind of way, which actually isn’t a bad approach, but I want to see how he does live on stage with professional debaters. That’s essentially what Congress is these days: modern sedate mortal combat for American lives in our Colosseum, battles put on for the rich and famous while everyone else watches and cheers, watches and jeers, or scalps entry coins out front.
> OP said there was one too many non-Black Zuckerbergs, which I took to mean the one we have was one too many, that is, they may prefer he were Black instead?
Poorly communicated on my part then. I was alluding to "one too many Zuckerbergs" - in my opinion _any_ Zuckerberg (in terms of a single individual being totally in charge of something like FB) is one too many.
One really great way to ensure that you're never invited to any parties by anyone, anywhere is demonstrating to everyone that you have a giant chip on your shoulder. If you riff on about how your being excluded is a symptom of everyone else's bias you'll be avoided like the plague.
This absolutely enraging, but I'd like to also point out that the author's own alma mater is about equidistant from UNC and Duke and was not visited. Why was that? Its absolutely disgusting that they treated A&T's stop this way but what's the excuse for excluding NC State?
NC A&T is an HBCU. The subtext isn't that recruiting teams prioritize top-tier schools --- of course every firm does this. Rather, it's that HBCUs get included in these trips, so that HR departments can report metrics about outreach to URMs ("trips made to HBCUs" are an especially straightforward metric), but when those visits actually occur, they're performed with such disrespect that they lay bare the underlying biases.
> What exactly about the tier of my undergrad and myself should I know?
Since you asked me, for some reason: that none of the rest of us are worried about it, and that some random unnamed company not recruiting there might not be something you need to worry about.
Clearly the company is worried about it - for the record, when I graduated I never got an interview or even an email response from the likely company in the story.
If you didn't understand that a degree from NC State came with less cachet than one from Duke when you signed up, I feel that's largely on you.
If you're worried the rankings which place Duke above your school are incorrect and you believe your CS program was as rigorous and useful as what the Duke students have, I can understand being frustrated by that. File under "life isn't fair."
I don't think anyone is going to defend the company in the story, for all the obvious reasons.
I don't, I'm just intrigued at the fact that someone in their 20s is bothered by this. Will this define who you are ? You probably would have worked at a FAANG post Duke as well. I think you wanted some "recognition" from your family ? Is that it ?
That in and of itself isn’t surprising. Programs tend to be ranked in top 5/10/25/50/100 kind of buckets and that would define where they’re recruiting from when they’re told “get the best” and have to draw an arbitrary line when the talent team have no idea what they’re actually recruiting for.
From what I’ve seen there is a real difference in the rigorousness of the top 5/10 CS depts and then everyone else is relatively the same at large state universities.
Go browse Blind for a few hours and you'll see how people really feel about these issues. I know some of the comments are in the minority, but even then, some of the comments are straight up vile.
Its just too bad that certain vile opinion are perfectly acceptable to say in public. Certain leaps of logic, generalization and bigotry, like the types exhibited in this medium post / or on twitter by the left every day.
In case you're genuinely asking, the answer is yes and I don't know why it wouldn't be. There are so many reasons that a high school math team would only be filled with Asians and white males and "because there's a lack of qualified minorities" is at the bottom of that list. Maybe there aren't enough minority students encouraged to engage in STEM activities or maybe toxic people like you make them uninterested.
I remember in high school my mom forcing me to join the math club, as she knew the teacher there. There were mostly Asians there. I don't think you could have paid most kids to be on that most unpopular of clubs. I stayed for as long as I had to in order to please Mom, then bounced. Other kids, if they were popular, were probably having a much more enjoyable high school experience -- a lot more black kids were in this 'popular' social group than in math club-- guess what -- completely by choice! And guess who I envied more and was denied entrance to -- yes the cream of the social crop. I guess you would like to find those Asians who just happened to like math for some nerdy reason, strip them of their jobs and give them to whomever you consider to be a minority/victim?
No, Asian-Americans count as minorities when white people want to throw them under the bus (Kung Flu, China Virus) but not when we're talking about unsuccessful-due-to-discrimination minorities, and thus earn the ire of white people that way, too.
This way the conservative and liberal prejudiced people can both hate that group equally, and for different reasons.
I had to practically threaten my best student (a female) to get her to go to a programming competition.
At which she proceeded to beat 80% of the teams by herself by answering 4 of the 10 problems outright. And then the rest of the team answered 2 more. They did quite well.
Her response: "That was fun. I'm pretty good at this."
<facepalm> Yeah, that's why I made you go.
I didn't shove her there because she was a female, I shoved her there because she was BY FAR the best student in my class. And the first time she showed up for a competition prep meeting, it was stupidly obvious just how much better she was than the rest of the team.
Some professor gave all of those students on the team a shove to get them there. Other professors had her as a student. None of them gave her a push to go do the competition. Why not?
That's the kind of thing that fills or drains the pipeline.
And that was college, a point where women finally aren't quite so worried about peer pressure. I imagine if I was teaching high school, I probably would have had to pull her parents in to exert enough pressure to make her go.
Your student didn't want to be involved in programming competitions because they are unglamorous, not because the environment was hostile to her, as your story demonstrates.
My student didn't want to be involved with a programming competition because she didn't know:
1) She was an amazingly good programmer relative to the field.
2) Programming competitions can be fun.
It's MY job as her senior to impart that knowledge.
The fact that no other professor imparted that knowledge is a problem--she should have had several professors imparting this knowledge. The fact this was not true shows that such things as "competition teams" are NOT meritocracies.
I make it a point to not be in SV, but I work for/am applying for companies based out of there.
Short answer? Yes. Especially if you have an accent. Less so if you don't, however I face plenty of exactly what the author speaks of when I went to my predominantly black college next door to a powerhouse technology school
In case people didn't read this story carefully before commenting (we all do that sometimes), it's worth calling the nut graf of this story out:
The firm this engineer is talking about did a recruiting trip to Duke (and UNC), like every big tech firm does. An hour away from Duke is the country's largest HBCU, NC A&T, which is included on the trip, ostensibly for inclusivity's sake.
The firm serves a catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session, which is held after class hours to ensure attendance. The next day, highly-ranked prospects from Duke/UNC are invited to a private dinner at a fine dining restaurant.
That same day, the firm holds an abbreviated meeting during class hours at A&T, where they serve (wait for it) the leftovers from the catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session.
It’s unfortunate the author didn’t call out the company by name but I guess I get it. If they did it may elicit some stronger push for change.
Unfortunately, anonymity can breed some distrust in the content. By calling out the company by name, it may cause others who experienced the same to speak out too.
Say what you will about Cisco licensing (too damn expensive in my opinion) but Cisco has consistently been rated as one of the best tech companies to work for. Which is something no one would say about IBM.
I'd love to know how people working on WebEx rate it because WebEx is the worst, the absolute worst, video and conference calling app I have to use at least semi-regularly. Every time I have to use it I know it's going to waste a huge amount of peoples' time: the first 5 minutes of any meeting are always a shitshow and the audio quality is always terrible throughout. Also, none of us needs to be interrupted by an automated announcement telling us that somebody has turned up 10 minutes late to the meeting - STFU and get out of the damn way of the conversation.
It gets trounced by Microsoft Teams. Teams! Think about that! The latecomer to the party that's actually turned into something pretty decent.
So I find it really hard to believe that anyone working on WebEx could possibly rate Cisco as a great place to work. A great place to sit around and do sweet F.A., maybe, whilst your userbase seethes and rages, but not a great place to work.
He said that he went on a trip TO North Carolina. His LinkedIn shows he worked for Cisco in RTP, NC. He then worked for Nutanix and Lyft in Seattle. So more likely it’s one of those two.
Idk, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear Hooli is The Hooli Box. At the same time, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear Cisco is a similarly nameless box for networking.
I have done University recruiting and been at recruiting events, I have never seen leftovers ever re-used, by any company, ever. I'm not even sure of the legality of that or the logistics of it. How were leftovers transported safely from one campus to another? 99% of the time, it's pizza (it's always pizza), and it's given away or thrown out at end of the event.
Probably something like, “oh, we have to go to this no name university next“, “what do we have?”, “well, we can bring these pizzas...”, “yeah okay, let’s put them in the car and get this over with quick”.
You're catching a lot of flack but in my experience this is true. We always leave the leftovers with the students who attended as (1) all students, regardless of school can always use some good leftovers, (2) the logistics and health concerns make this pretty much impossible. You 'd have to be a sick SOB and put in extra effort to do this; not characteristics of HR drones who just want to check a box.
Heh, this reminded me of my previous company, where the CEO hosted a Christmas party at her house where only the development team was invited. The next day, the rest of the company was served the left-overs, instead of the regular catering.
It was definitely an eye-opening moment for everyone in terms of realizing which department was the CEO's favorite.
Well, the CEO herself came from a computer science background, and was of the mindset that the product was so good it sold itself. She constantly complained that the sales team might as well be digging ditches in the desert. Didn't have the guts to test that theory, though.
Historically Black Colleges and Universities came out of the very interesting history of the US. Where black people were paying taxes to universities they were legally discriminated from attending. Rather than treating people of all races as equal those states created vocational colleges (anything with Ag in the name was a vocation school) exclusively for black students. And even then they were given a pittance of funding compared to other public universities (referred to as PWIs, predominantly white institutions).
One of the more disappointing aspects of this-- it's not even a good service to these businesses to operate this way. Some of the least effective colleagues I've had the pleasure of working with attended these brand name schools. Now, I certainly wouldn't say that represents all graduates, but some of them are absolutely being carried because they look good on paper. That's no way to build out your workforce.
This is certainly the prior I bring to this story: that all this elite recruiting is horseshit anyways. But, of course, that horseshit also gatekeeps the most lucrative jobs in one of the most important white collar professions in our economy.
I just don't get which world the people who make these decisions live in. I've worked as a developer for almost 2 decades now & some of the best programmers I worked with were high school or college drop outs. And some of those that went to elite schools were mediocre.
I'm sure there is some positive correlation between school ranking and quality of education but it seems too weak & there are so many exceptions for this 1 data point about a candidate to be given such weight. I'd absolutely take someone who went to Colorado State University & has 3 years of relevant job experience than someone fresh out of Stanford (all other things being equal).
Also almost every time I was involved in hiring we had more competent candidates to choose from than we had jobs to fill (with exception of the highest tier jobs, like searching for a Tech Director or CTO which nobody is giving to people fresh out of school anyway) so why do you even need to butter up the Duke grads? Are recent grads with no job experience so desirable in the US?
According to this study, you're correct. The funny thing is that when it was discussed in HN at the time is that the thread had many comments from students who went to MIT, Stanford, etc. trying to deny it.
During my undergrad years, there were people who made it out without programming in any language besides Java, and barely did any tech hobbies or independent programming outside of class. There were others who were constantly learning other languages, playing with random tech, and building small opens source tools and webapps.
I've met people who went through community collect programs who didn't understand basic BigO notation or algorithm optimization (no fault to them; it's just not taught in a lot of two year courses) and I've know people with only high school degrees who've picked up advanced CS books and would learn about compile theory and different types of parsing on their own for fun.
Absolutely you get out what you put in. My company has thousands of programmers. I was in charge of helping a group of programmers self learn a new framework/language. It started off with 30. It ended up with me alone in a room. This was easily 3k worth of free classes. It was not even that hard you just had to watch some videos and maybe do some simple coding, maybe 1-2 hours a week, 9 sessions over 3 months. Most just did not do it, which means they would not show up to the sessions. By the last 2 sessions I just did not bother to try to get them to come. There were 3 I could kind of coach along and get them to sometimes engage. But mostly they just were not interested in helping themselves. They wanted me to sit in front of the 'class' and teach it. Now that I think about it this could be a good way to filter for people who are motivated to do work. But it would bias against people who have a full schedule.
Nah, your instructor's/TA's time is limited. I can't schedule 6 hours with them. I can't request as much time as I want. Colleges have other prerequisites which must be filled. The American systems don't let you go to college and do nothing but computers, and you must take time away from programming courses eventually. I can't maximize the time for programming, so, I'm limited to what I can put in. And if it's a tough college, it takes real effort to pass those other courses and you likely can't just coast. It's a forcing function with guidance.
If I put in a ton of time on my own to study stuff from the internet, that's the internet returning my investment of time and focus. It's got nothing to do with the college at that point.
I found that if you want to talk about the professor's research area, they will often have time to talk, at least at the beginning / end of classes or over emails.
I'm not as sure with TA's, partly because I often skipped the TA-sessions for various reasons.
> I've worked as a developer for almost 2 decades now & some of the best programmers I worked with were high school or college drop outs. And some of those that went to elite schools were mediocre.
Within the software industry there should be a negative correlation between school quality and performance as an employee. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox . People who are unqualified and unfit to do good work have been removed from the pool. Anyone in the pool who is unqualified must be fit to do good work.
I think on the engineering side it's different. the interview process is the gatekeeping and FAANG companies are totally open to interviewing anyone who thinks they can get through the process. Your ability to climb into Sr leadership might be impacted, if that's the direction you want to go, but you can absolutely prove yourself in engineering.
Also, I like your point about CSU. I do a lot of hiring in the Boston area, and we have so many "second-tier" schools who produce absolutely excellent SEs. It might be trickle-down because of MIT here. Don't get me wrong, definitely hire MIT, but we also cherry-pick from Northeastern, WPI (my favorite), etc. with equally as good results.
For someone who was just starting out and went to a no name college (no insult intended - I did), what signals would a FAANG company have that you are even worth their time interviewing?
I graduated in the mid 90s so I really don’t have a frame of reference. But, hypothetically speaking, if I had graduated in 2012 from the same no name college but spent a lot of time “grinding leetCode” and had the technical altitude to do well in the interview would they have even given me a chance?
I also went to a good but unknown school and was recruited by Amazon and Google. As far as I can tell it was purely due to applicable work experience (which I got working in companies you never heard of).
No one is arguing that once you have your first job, what college you went to matters. If you can get that first job, then only experience matters.
Heck on my very sparse LinkedIn profile, it basically showed me as an enterprise C# CRUD developer and recruiters were reaching out to me from Facebook and Google even though I wouldn’t get through the first fifteen minutes of a technical phone screen for either without at least six months to a year of prep. Recruiters throw out a wide net.
That being said, after the local market tanked post Covid, and my unknown company with less than 50 people all in did an across the board pay cut, I threw a Hail Mary and applied for a remote job as a consultant for AWS. I had the experience and I knew it was going to be a remote interview so I took a chance and got in.
But would they have recruited interns from my no name college - even if I did try to give them some type of signal like side projects and an AWS cert?
I think one thing is that people factor the college they went to in terms of the jobs they are seeking (not just in terms of pay, but also prestige of the company they are looking at, flexibility with moving, etc.), that may not matter as much at the high-end of the pay range or after years of experience, but I think right out of college this is important.
My argument is basically the low-end of the jobs that someone who went to Princeton and excelled in computer science is willing to settle for is higher than the low-end of jobs that someone who went to a lesser-name school and excelled in computer science is willing to settle for.
In theory, if the difference in quality of education is enough, then the level of education that someone who excelled in computer science at Princeton vs someone who excelled in computer science at a lesser-name college would equal out this difference in expectations, but I don't think that is the case, at least when we are talking about high-end school vs mid-range school.
Moreover, in computer science especially there is a lot of self-learning. Someone who has done consistently better than their peers probably has a good talent for self-learning, even if the average of their peers is lower.
I think you get the same discount for quality when hiring weird people or people with odd job histories.
My general idea here is that if someone is less desirable in a way which you do not care about but where other companies might care about, they are probably going to be on average of higher quality than someone more conventionally desirable asking for the same salary range. Not saying this is an iron law, but I think it is a tendency.
I've never heard of NC A&T so I went to Wikipedia [0] and learned their average undergrad SAT on intake is ~1,000. Average SAT at Duke is something like 1,500.
One of those is top 5%, the other is sub-50%. It seems a stretch to say the biggest problem the NC A&T group faced was not being invited to the right parties.
SAT isn't the be-all and end all, but those difference are far too large to be brushed aside. It is not at all obvious that race is the major factor here.
There is a case here that the recruiters were being realistic; the smart black candidates would presumably be working to get into some university other than NC A&T. The CS program entrants would need to look like legitimate geniuses compared to the average to qualify for red carpet treatment.
Actually, that's how lots of graduate recruitment is moving to, looking at those contextual elements now (such as value add, and performing better compared to relative median).
Sometimes this means that someone graduating from a university with a decent degree when the average intake grades were comparatively low shows they are and are capable of outperforming to a greater extent. They don't have to evidence themselves as legitimate geniuses, just that they have the capacity to develop faster.
Obviously it then comes down to bias about whether the university is just scoring people higher, but that's a whole different ballgame.
Brand name universities still get the preferential treatment though, often because they have more developed alumni links with the hiring companies.
I'm sorry, but I didn't get into Duke as a 17 year old. Does that mean my career prospects are shot for good, and that "Hooli-esque" companies shouldn't recruit me?
I'd say the software engineering side of things are a bit different, the interview process and testing "is the gatekeeping". It might impact your ability to climb the ladder when you're competing for Sr Manager positions with a bunch of MIT/Standford/Harvard/etc type of graduates, depending on where you live....
...but by then, you'd have crushed your early career and gone off and gotten a prestigious Master's Degree, or founded your own company and sold it to one of the bigger fish, earning your way into Sr Leadership...
"Wir haben es nicht gewusst" is what the Germans used after WW2, but part of me can believe it because the world wasn't as connected as it is today.
Today though? It does not fly. People know about it, and if they are not actively participating in stopping it, they are complicit - "not my problem, I don't care, blue/all lives matter, what about these crime statistics, muh freedom", these are all people that know about it but do not care, or they do care but they're on the wrong side.
Since this is written by a Black person in tech, my guess is that his beliefs are based on a lifetime of being treated as a second-class citizen, and this anecdote was merely a particularly obvious case.
However, like you, I am way of anecdotes and put more faith in empirical studies [1]. So what do the data say? Turns out they align with the lived experience of the author: widespread hiring bias by employers hurting Black people.
This is BS. The study is from 2003 and isn't about elite tech jobs. There is evidence that, nowadays, there is a large bias in favor of women and under-represented minorities in, for example, academia and top-tier tech when controlling for resume.
Note, when looking at this literature: there is a huge publication bias. Publishing a paper that fits the popular (in social sciences) narratives is easy, publishing one that goes against them (like the one I linked) is hard and may well be career suicide. Also, the bar for what constitutes good enough science in these areas is very low.
> Publishing a paper that fits the popular (in social sciences) narratives is easy, publishing one that goes against them (like the one I linked) is hard and may well be career suicide.
The Occam’s Razor explanation for this is that the popular narratives are popular because most available evidence supports them.
Yes, the person you're responding to made a point about precisely that — available evidence.
The file-drawer effect is real and multifaceted, including political narrative strategy. If you don't think that editors consider this aspect of maintaining their journals' reputations, you are simply naive.
> The Occam’s Razor explanation for this is that the popular narratives are popular because most available evidence supports them.
That seems like a bit of abuse of Occam's razor. Narratives are popularized by the general media, not scientists. Just compare how popular the idea that IQ is meaningless and not heritable is amongst the general population and the media compared to those who actually study the topic full time at universities.
Universities and people in them are not immune to pressure. Wasn't Hsu fired partly because he funded research into police shootings that ended up getting a politically incorrect result?
Authors of unpopular results (Rind et al anyone?) often get attacked a lot, their research subject to a disproportionate level of scrutiny and it's very career limitting (or is at least rumoured to be, which is plenty of a chilling effect).
Steve Hsu wasn't fired. He resigned from his position overseeing other people's research. He kept his position as a professor with tenure.
Cesario and Johnson studied fatal shootings by police. Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings. That was only a small part of the case the graduate employee union presented against Hsu. The letter started by faculty[1] didn't mention it at all.
I don't want to get too down into the weeds as my point is that people and the media have a big influence on what science gets done and what is career limitting. That said:
Most of the "case" was nonesense, with the actual letter (which had a fraction of the signatures of the counter-letter) being mostly guilt by association.
> Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings.
It was relevant because Floy was a police killing. Racial bias in police killings (the vast majority are with guns) was the main thing the protestors I've heard were protesting.
Someone could argue Hsu was effectively demoted but he wasn't even effectively fired. Someone can disagree with the case against him but that isn't a good reason to misrepresent it.
Only a small fraction of the signatures supporting Hsu have any affiliation with his university. And would you care which petition had more signatures if it was the other way around?
The protesters' demands for equity and police accountability aren't limited to fatal shootings or even all killings.
The problem with controlling for resume is that getting a strong resume requires getting those jobs in the first place. That doesn't disprove that there could be a bias against women and minorities that stopped them from achieving equivalent resumes in the first place.
It's something important to think about, but I don't think it holds in the case of beginning-of-career resumes. It's not about getting "those jobs", it's about getting admitted to one of the best programs. That's the filter. You're right that subsequent steps flow from that, generally. Though I would argue that there is much more space in CS / programming for the self-taught and self-motivated than there is in most other fields. Most other fields: you don't have the credentials? There's the door. Try being a biologist without a degree in biology!
Saying you're discriminated against is more of a function of what you are told to perceive. Current generation blacks are more likely to say they are discriminated against than any generation prior.
Wow, that's really fucking terrible. That should have brought up so many red flags. At this point I'm of the opinion that sensitivity training shouldn't be something done post facto as an apology. Give sensitivity training to everybody preemptively. First, sensitivity training is not and should not be a punishment. We should all be at best excited and at worst neutral about expanding our worldview and learning from others. Second, we shouldn't have this weird system where Alice calls Bob out, HR makes Bob do sensitivity training, Bob has some resentment for being embarrassed and Alice still doesn't feel comfortable around Bob.
Also sensitivity training isn't the best name. It practically writes its own insults. Maybe call it something like diversity promotion or anti-racism training. It's a lot harder to opt out to anti-racism training.
We all have blind spots. We need to erase them. Let's do it together.
No diversity training. Minorities already receive positive discrimination in tech companies and hiring in general. Studies around blind hiring have revealed that when names are concealed even less minorities get selected.
While school specific recruiting trips maybe drive results for recruiting teams, there is no way to get away from inherit bias. By only recruiting at "top schools" you skip talent that couldn't afford tuition at an elite school and chose scholarships over paying 60k a year. You optimize for who could do well on the SAT in high school, which is inherently a product of privilege and who could pay to study for the test and even knew it was a road block (I didn't realize the SAT was important until friends that went to "good schools told me to study for it. In school I was always told you couldn't study for it). Systemic doesn't necessarily mean any particular individual is biased. The entire way we conduct business is.
Then why do minorities such as Indian Americans and other Asian Americans do so well in tech? Is it systemically biased for Asians? Where in the world do they do this correctly, by the way? What country or nation in the world has bias figured out so well that they have perfect proportionality among all races and sexes among all career paths?
The answer is probably complicated. I'd guess that India pushing tech in their education system is one factor. Indians and Asians are also a numerous and growing cohort, whose families are immigrating from higher populated regions. Their families may also encourage their children to go into tech. And the racist stereotypes these populations face are likely very different than others, such as African Americans.
It has nothing to do with India's education system.
It's that if you are Indian, you will not be allowed into the US unless you have a bachelor's in something leading into some high paying occupation. In fact, your odds are pretty bad unless you have a master's from an American university.
The majority of Indian and Asian Americans you see in the US are self-selected to be the richest and most successful ones from their country. Those who don't come from rich families, those who didn't go to the top schools in their country, are much more likely to just stay home, instead of get sponsored by their families to go to the other side of the world to search out the best opportunities.
> The majority of Indian and Asian Americans you see in the US are self-selected to be the richest and most successful ones from their country.
For Indian and Asian Americans, “their country” is the USA, and especially for Asian Americans, it's not uncommon that was true of their ancestors for several generations.
>> The majority of Indian and Asian Americans you see in the US are self-selected to be the richest and most successful ones from their country.
This is absolutely not true for "majority." A significant minority of them, this is probably true about, but a cursory review of how Chinese-Americans arrived to this country will probably dispel this rumor fairly quickly.
54% of Chinese Americans have a Bachelor’s or higher, 50% for foreign born. Things have changed in the last 30 years. Trust me when I say 50% of Chinese in China do not have a university degree.
Hmm, international students have to pay a full ride. So maybe you'd say that the immigrant population is roughly the same caliber as the portion of the native population that is too successful to qualify for financial aid.
> Then why do minorities such as Indian Americans and other Asian Americans do so well in tech
Because for Indians and other Asians, doing well in tech is one of the main ways of becoming Americans. If we kicked out all the current black people and then had employment-based immigrant and dual-intent visas as the main route for blacks to enter the country and start the road to citizenship, then once there were Black Americans again, they'd seem like a pretty darn successful demographic.
> What country or nation in the world has bias figured out so well that they have perfect proportionality among all races and sexes among all career paths?
All career paths is probably a bit of a strawman. I doubt you'll find anyone here who expects same number of men and women in every job. The more dangerous ones will always be disproportionately picked by men and that's ok.
On the margins, SATs are a "fairer", harder to game metric than most of the others.
Yes, rich people can put their children through test prep courses. However, the differential impact is much less than what they can do with grades or even worse, extra-curriculars.
A bright, economically disadvantaged teen can do very well on a standardized test. That same teen has no way of doing an impressive non-profit over the summer in another country, as many wealthier Ivy League applicants do.
Exactly! Every time someone brings up discarding standardized testing for college admissions, they ignore how the remaining admission criteria can be even better gamed by the wealthy and upper middle class. Standardized testing may be imperfect, but its one of the few ways an exceptional student from a less well off background can distinguish themselves.
It's definitely not that women and other groups simply aren't interested in tech jobs when they go to college, nope, it's some sort of vague ambiguous bigotry that's a problem that needs to be solved.
Tired of this narrative that if too many white people or men or white men work in a field or business then that is by default a sign of racism, sexism, or some kind of bigotry. Different groups of people broadly show interest in different careers.
You said you are tired of this narrative. What's your narrative?
I'm assuming you read the article, but it behooves you to state you did or didn't, since you seem to miss the point.
This article points out there were two recruiting events, with very different approaches. Two sets of engineers, one treated very differently.
Your comments just aren't relative to this conversation. They might be true, but don't disprove anything said in this article. They do seem to indicate you didn't read the article.
Wow. This confirms something I saw SO often as an undergrad.
I went to a predominantly black city college right next door to Georgia Tech, so we got plenty of big companies knocking on our door.
Only they never took us seriously, gave rushed presentations, and never collected resumes. Tech? They got parties, dinners, entire clubs rented out. It was posh, and if you were like me - you figured out ways to get into these exclusive events, evade bouncers and find an engineer just to talk to them.
There are a few people in this comment section talking about how 'minorities and women simply skew differently'. Maybe try walking a mile in our shoes
Do you think it could possibly be that the black city college might be a lower ranked school than Georgia Tech? Or did Georgia Tech not have any women or minorities? I went to a lower ranked school that was the most diverse in the state, and I've also taken classes at Stanford and Berkeley. There is no question that the students at Stanford and Berkeley were way more motivated, worked a lot harder and were academically much stronger than the students at my school. So I would expect those schools to get a lot more recruiting attention than my school. That doesn't mean the students at my school can't be successful, but it did mean that you had to put in a lot more work than the median student at the lower-ranked school to be successful.
The subtext of the story is that the HBCU was visited to check a checkbox, but the students at that school were treated with such disrespect that the underlying bias was clear.
Nobody has any trouble understanding that Duke is a higher-priority recruiting target than A&T.
While perhaps not the most professional on the recruiters' part it's hardly racist to half-ass a 'check the checkbox' assignment. Unlike the racist tokenism and just outright disrespectful facade of visiting a school when there is little to no (apparent) interest in hiring from.
It's definitely a little racist to half ass it so hard you're serving leftovers from another school.
I don't think I really agree that visiting HBCUs is racist tokenism unless it is 100% just to get diversity brownie points and nothing else: it's still better than not visiting them entirely and to provide opportunities to underrepresented minorities for which, while the intent is to put them into the corporate grinder, having a high-paying tech job is still a material benefit.
> It's definitely a little racist to half ass it so hard ...
Without seeing how they treated students at a similarly ranked non-HBCU, it's difficult to distinguish racism from colorblind elitism. It's probably a bit of both racism and elitism, but without a comparably ranked school for comparison, I wouldn't be comfortable using the word "definitely".
Ok. If you are going to agree that the situation is almost certainly the result of at least implicit racism, and the alternatives are pretty unlikely then cool. You agree.
The second sentence of my post begins "It's probably a bit of both racism and elitism." I was careful to point that out before pointing out that it's jumping to conclusions to use the word "definitely".
While perhaps not the most professional on the recruiters' part it's hardly racist to half-ass a 'check the checkbox' assignment.
This is exactly why you can't reasonably accept treating one group of people differently - it might be a lazy recruiter half-ass'ing their job, but it might also be actual real racism. There's no way to tell by looking. The outcome is the same.
If you're willing to give them a pass you might just be enabling a racist.
A. What you'll have to do will depend in how finely you divide your population. E.g. recent african immigrant vs. Slave descended are quite different demographics with different life trajectories and you'll be able to tell one from another very easily.
There will be huge political fights over these categories.
B. If you do hire based on population demographics then two things will happen: You'll get a bit more inefficient workplace due to unperforming workers. But more importantly, you'll be surrounding people with a bunch of Xers (whichever the underperfoming demographics is. Hillbillies? African Americans? Republicans? Left handed folk?) who are underperforming. This will cause a strong association in their mind that X=less capable. Xism will then increase.
The influx of women to my workplace really didn't help my colleague's sexism.
I think the GP is trying to say there's obvious bias and disrespect, but it's not obvious that the disrespect was primarily due to racism or primarily due to school ranking. No school of comparable ranking to A&T but a more Duke-like racial makeup was visited in this instance. There was racism and/or elitism displayed, but there isn't enough information in this story to rule out elitism being the primary driver for the lack of respect.
Certainly the students should have been treated with much more respect. Multiple people clearly confused priority and respect. The two student bodies should have been treated with equal respect, but we can understand why they might not get equal priority. However, there's not enough evidence to rule out plain elitism for the lack of respect.
Why bother going to NC A&T if you didn't want the students from there? It's performative at best. Why choose that college in particular? For a diversity quota?
I'm of the opinion it's better that they go, but reasonable people disagree. There are certainly potential economic benefits to the students at A&T at the time, but it could be argued that longer-term cultural progress is hindered by such token displays.
Often these sorts of inconsistent decision making occur because multiple people making decisions disagree. Maybe some person high up in HR in change of recruiting scheduling decided Duke and A&T would be visited on these days. Maybe the person in charge of planning the details felt very strongly they were better off putting whatever resources earmarked for A&T toward events with minority-focused engineering student groups at Duke, and so raided the budget without going head-to-head with the person in charge of recruiting scheduling.
For the same reason you don't serve leftovers on a first date with someone you're trying to impress. Which was ostensibly what this firm was trying to do at A&T.
Or, you know, like people have pointed out the Cisco has done when other people were speculating this might have been them - invest/donate to the school in ways that improve their graduate's outcomes...
"Cisco, at least at a time did invest in A&T and NC State, far more so than UNC which it didn’t recruit from for a period."
Right. So much of the "racism" that gets exposed in the US is discrimination against poor or less educated people, which needs to be cast as racism to keep the outrage machine flowing. You should tend to discount any race-based statistics that don't correct for economic status.
Of course, there are no examples of elite black-dominated universities abutting poor white technical colleges, so it's not possible to look for an anecdote in the opposite direction here.
There's plenty of historic and systemic racism that keeps black people poorer and less educated. That's where people's outrage should be focused.
What do you really think about the matter at hand? It sounds like you're playing devil's advocate, but you're not expressing how you feel about the unfair treatment itself.
I can confirm this from the other side. I was a computer science grad from Georgia Tech. When talking with people from Morehouse, the events they experienced with recruiters was very different and less engaged than mine.
If we are going to talk about Georgia Tech, it is worth noting, GT is:
No.1 in engineering doctoral degrees awarded to African American students
No.1 in engineering undergraduate degrees awarded overall to minorities
No.2 in engineering undergraduate degrees awarded to African American students
No.3 in engineering doctoral degrees awarded overall to minorities
As someone just starting to grow a development team (currently four people) in Denver CO, I’m already thinking about how to build a diverse group. Does anyone have any resources, books, or maybe just some plain common sense advice to recommend?
I’m not really one to ask about this, as I don’t hire people and am white so can’t really give any context to this recommendation, but you could ask the people involved in Juneteenth Conference for help? It was founded by a Black Microsoft engineer, so I’m sure their network has some people with the right stuff for your needs, and I’m sure they also know some good people of other backgrounds too. We all can help diversity directly by recommending our friends to each other, when appropriate.
Also, diversity isn’t only about race, although it is also about that. It’s also about equal access. @AccessForAll on Twitter can probably help you much better than I can in that area.
From personal experience: Don't hire just to tick boxes. It will cause resentment, insecurity and reinforce stereotypes.
Go out of your way to find underrepresented people (small town girls?) but raise the hiring bar slightly to accomodate for the interviee process error bars (if you're looking at a larger sample with a lower average using an error prone measuring device you'll get more people over the bar due to measurement error).
I don't think building a diverse group is a reasonable goal. You should try to build the BEST group you can. If you do that right, it might turn out to be diverse.
Be prepared to train people. This goes for any job really, some jobs you'll be lucky that you're fishing in a big pool (say, Java developers), but a lot of jobs are more specialized. Have a good onboarding plan. Hire on interest and eagerness, not on current CV / skills.
I dunno, the idealized Uber driving career sounds like something a student could do as a side job. That's how IIRC Uber started off as, but it quickly became a more-than-full-time job for a lot of people.
I'm guessing this wasn't in the CSE building though... I remember going to career fairs at UW - it was a shit show. Nothing remarkable ever showed up. The line for Amazon being a mile long and a guy just pitching resumes into a shredder. As far as I know, the ones for the CSE department were better - of course.
Pretty weird that the story doesn't involve him bringing up the problem with HR or other engineering managers. The people who do the main revenue-generating work of a company (e.g. engineers in a tech company, the finance people in an investment bank) usually have a lot more power in an organization than HR / recruiting. So if he didn't do that, does that make him complicit in the racism? Or if he did try and got stonewalled, he should share that, along with the name of the company.
And it doesn't smell right that an organization would risk giving a bunch of candidates food poisoning and getting a lawsuit by serving them day-old catered food. I'm certainly willing to believe it could happen, but 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' - in this case I'd settle for him giving the name of the company so that either others can confirm, or they can rebut.
I've spoken out against HR for dissimilar reasons and found myself out of the job not too long later. I don't blame him for not raising his head at his workplace...
I think you need to spend less time attacking people who bring issues to light, and more time recognizing and agreeing that there is a problem in the industry that needs to be solved.
Attacking the person who is bringing the issue to light makes it seem like one is trying to distract from the issue being brought up, and put blame on the individual for talking about the problem.
It is entirely possible for there to be a pipeline problem, and also for behavior like the one described in the post to bias recruiting. Two things can be true.
after spending exactly no words refuting pipeline issues. I'm left to conclude that the author feels the two explanations are mutually exclusive and that by giving an anecdote about one, you can determine the other isn't real.
I grew up in Greensboro where A&T is located. Many of my high school classmates went to college there. One friend even led the top CS student org on campus.
I pushed so hard for my employer, Sexy Unicorn Startup which said all the important things you expect a woke company to say, to recruit there. I told them I would set everything up and that all I needed was a budget. I got nothing but lip service.
So, HN, you want to do it the right way? I can be on A&T's campus in 15 minutes. I will connect you with the student orgs and help you do it the right way. You won't regret it. Email is in profile.
Speculation, but: I'd bet they don't say this to get diversity hires, they say this to get left hires. Tech skews left, but not minority. (Asians, as we all know, don't count.) If you try but can't hire minorities, nothing particularly bad happens as long as you have tokens somewhere in a visible role. If you try but can't hire leftists, because your signalling is insufficiently woke, you have a problem.
People are too comfortable. Your life exists in a tech bubble where your biggest annoyances are the most trivial things (my Tesla panels don't line up, ios does this annoying thing, someone said something rude on twitter)
Techies are so coddled that the very idea of interacting with a person with a wildly different background and communication styles is anxiety inducing, so they find a way around it.
The slights won't stop until you leave the comfort bubble, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Let's not pretend like it's just the tech industry though, which is actually more meritocratic than most. For example when it comes to diversity and inclusiveness, high finance and management consulting make the tech industry look like a UN convention. They pretty much exclusively recruit at Ivy league equivalent schools, which are composed of an absurdly disproportionate amount of kids from wealthy backgrounds (any middle class kid who gets accepted to an Ivy probably got a substantial scholarship to their flagship state university).
> Techies are so coddled that the very idea of interacting with a person with a wildly different background and communication styles is anxiety inducing
You're saying recruiting from different backgrounds (e.g. small town god fearing republican) could give my developers anxiety?
I'm surprised nobody's commented with the first thing that occurred to me: UNC, Duke, and NC A&T. One of these is not like the others. It's NC A&T. Why? It's not race. It's the fact that UNC and Duke are much, much better schools. The top North Carolina Black developer talent is...already at Duke, of course.
Cisco or whoever may have been stopping by NC A&T to tick a box and therefore treated it perfunctorily. The author might also be exaggerating, it's certainly in his/her best interests. We all might do well to avoid drawing any conclusions from anecdote.
No, the author claimed that NC A&T was "a damn good one [school]".
The author was trying to put it on the same level as Duke/UNC in order to paint a picture that the only possible reason for the perfunctory treatment was racism. But NC A&T is not on the same level. "Hooli" is almost certainly elitist, but this anecdote is not good evidence for systemic racism.
> No, the author claimed that NC A&T was "a damn good one [school]".
> The author was trying to put it on the same level as Duke/UNC in order to paint a picture that the only possible reason for the perfunctory treatment was racism. But NC A&T is not on the same level. "Hooli" is almost certainly elitist, but this anecdote is not good evidence for systemic racism.
Author here. I wasn’t implying that A&T is perceived to be as “prestigious” or highly ranked as Duke. I’m just trying to say that it was certainly worth visiting and worth taking seriously. If you’re looking for black engineers, for whatever reason, it’s reasonable to reach for A&T. Now, you can’t claim a pipeline problem if you’re pretty much ignoring the places where you’re most likely to find your target demographic.
Let’s just drop the words “racism” and other “-isms” since they seem to trigger people and become distracting from the point. What the recruiters did by phoning it in for A&T and focus on Duke was miss out on potentially excellent engineers from A&T and reinforce the demographics found at Duke/UNC. The recruiters made an assumption based on some model they built at Hooli and other companies like it and didn’t do their job, which was to FIND good talent.
I’ve worked at “elite” companies with people from “elite” schools. I’ve also worked with people from no school. There are smart people all over the place, so we don’t need to look at the same 10 schools and ignore the people who didn’t take out a $75k student loan.
Thanks for the explanation. Yeah, I absolutely agree that as a society we should stop placing so much emphasis on "prestigious" schools and using that as such a strong filter.
That being said, you could say that recruiters might "miss out on excellent engineers by not visiting _____", where the blank is any one of thousands of schools in the US. In this particular case, it seems like an instance of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" – in general, a recruiter is just gonna look better if they recruit talent from top-rated school than from lower rated ones.
To me, the solution is to stop recruiting on college campuses in general if the job in question doesn't actually require a degree in order to perform it.
Yeah, that’s not a bad idea and it’s why I’m such a fanboy of interviewing.io and that whole platform. I don’t think it’s that hard to come up with new interview questions and screen through an anonymous platform.
I just think there’s not enough pressure on these companies to rework how they do interviews, since nobody believes that they’d actually get higher quality candidates.
That's the point. Saying there's a pipeline problem when you ignore where the pipeline you're looking for is actually located is being silly.
In general there's an extremely strong belief in the bay area that it's not worth considering graduates of schools outside the top as being worth considering.
That's how you end up with entire companies treating the entire middle of the US as "flyover country."
I've gone on numerous recruiting trips and this story paints a very one sided narrative and it doesn't quite line with my own experiences.
First off, big feeder schools, the Dukes and UNCs of the world, they have extremely sophisticated internal career programs that throw out the red carpet for us when we arrive. Yes we order the food (and its usually pizza), but they literally do all the pre-work and advertise for us, give us the floor and make sure we have the best chances to meet their students. They schedule the program and the times for us, so we just roll in, present, and then have lots of meet and greet with the students.
Second, recruiters only have so much time and energy to meet with students, so they have to go to places with the least friction. The recruiters live by the rule, meet that quota or you're out! So that translates to, schools better have students who can pass the interview process, or they are out.
My company has a huge list of diversity schools that we actively recruit from. This goes against the rules above and requires special recruiters who aren't being tracked against the same quota system. Why? Although these diversity schools produce highly qualified candidates, their career programs aren't sophisticated enough, nor is the coursework aligned with the goal of getting these students into silicon valley tech jobs.
Remember, at a very real level, you're competing for the same jobs at the same level as someone graduating from CMU or MIT. If your CS department isn't preparing you for what's ahead, you have to make that knowledge-gap up on your own.
Or maybe recruiters could make bigger efforts to make up that gap, instead of throwing up their hands and accepting the institutionalized racism that they are dealt.
When everyone at every point in the pipeline throws their hands up and points the finger in front of them, no one takes action and we end up in the same place. As another reply said, change your recruiting practices to account for this difference.
Change isn't free - the question is if companies are willing to spend time and resources for it. Every time a company does this, they have put a price on their acceptance of the problem. For some companies that's a needed survival choice. There are many that are choosing to not fix the problem and instead focus on Wall Street numbers or similar, even though they clearly have enough profit/funding to invest in this societal problem.
Do you consider the treatment of NC A&T by Hooli to be disrespectful? I certainly do.
The treatment looks to me like people (or the firm) felt obligated to show up but not obligated to put much effort in or to expect to recruit anyone. If they are running a recruiting event with little expectation of recruiting, does that not agree with the article’s view that the event was solely paying lip service to diversity.
I went to a school that’s definitely not ranked near 10 like Duke (didn’t get into Duke) and was also ignored by the $COMPANY despite being in the same region and being the authors alma mater.
What, exactly, do you think my class of CS grads should do when recruiting?
I checked the world rankings by CWUR https://cwur.org and it's below second-tier universities from my country which are all pretty low down the list to begin with.
Nevertheless if the details of this story are true this company might have well not bothered visiting.
Whenever I set a benchmark for tone-deafness someone eventually swoops in and makes me re-evaluate it.
I have no problem believing that there is bias and systemic issues in tech hiring. But you're right, looking at the school rankings shows some problems in the logic.
"Hooli didn't treat a low ranked school as well as they did an extremely high ranked school, must be racism."
It's more about false pretenses, and thereby racism (or, at best, massive negligence and lack of self awareness)
I could agree that more recruiting resources should be dedicated towards higher ranking schools, but food scraps and half-hearted presentations just for PR points falls wayyy below just "lower resources".
Would you rather just not have a company show up, or have a recruiter essentially treat you like a dog?
Note that the article mentions they did drive two hours each way (!!) to give the presentation. Surely that's better than "essentially treat you like a dog."
University rankings are next to useless for determining whether a student would be a good developer. Look at the metrics US News uses to rank universities:
* Research reputation
* # of publications, conferences, books
* # of citations
* # of highly cited papers
Where's quality of teaching? Where's student employability after graduation? Where's numbers of student internships? Where's teacher to student ratio? None of these matter to most university ranking lists.
I'm pretty deep in the college admissions and rankings world. You are not looking into the methodologies closely here. US News is a far cry from relevancy.
To teaching:
> The Best Undergraduate Teaching rankings are based solely on the responses to this separate section of the 2019 peer assessment survey.
So you have a bunch of high up academic deans being asked to rank teaching at hundreds of schools. This just boils down to name brand and is not a representation of teaching quality.
Same goes for the methodology for co-op's/internships if you read up there. It's all a self fulfilling prophecy of prestige.
Class size, yeah that's a real metric, but there are a decent deal of large schools with known CS programs with large classes near that 18:1 - why haven't those been eliminated from recruiting?
And just how do you think the school ratings are calculated? Graduation rates. Job acceptance rate into industry. Oh, wait, that sounds like a self-reinforcing cycle.
Structural racism runs deep.
What makes you think Duke is some all-white club. I went to Duke and there were lots of African-American students. My guess is that Duke has among the most Affirmative Action of any school.
It's safer and easier to blame structural racism than to look at multi factor reasons.
Partly because to deny structural racism is itself racist therefore strengthening ones case innately, but mainly because as it does really exist so there would always be some influence and something that's in the news right now so it's a fashionable concept to attach any blame on.
Also it gives good social credit to mention it in case people with power over ones career or future question one. It really is a no brainer, we should use it more often.
I'm not being sarcastic here, the benefits of blaming structural racism for complex causes far exceeds any costs of not doing so.
It’s also safe and easy to say “no racism here no sir” when confronted with difficult problems and decisions about justice.
I’ve experienced a small example of this. In elementary school the majority minority school in the district sent basically no kids to the gifted magnet school. Like zero. For years, people just said what you said. My parents actually dug into it and found that grade distributions were similar and the problem was that administrators at the white schools knew how to write glowing recommendations and the admin at the other school didn’t exaggerate as much. A little bit of coordination and adjusting the recommendation letter form structure and bam suddenly way more kids from the majority minority school.
But for years people just said “well that’s a worse school, what do you expect”.
It sounds like you’re arguing that there was racism, whereas your example suggests there wasn’t racism, just differences in application process - it certainly doesn’t sound like there was any resistance to improving the process in a way that resulted in dramatically increased success of minority students. Or am I misinterpreting something?
Structural racism often means there is no one person to blame - there's not going to be a person we can hold up and say, "Here's the racist!" This was a racist outcome because the students, staff and parents in the minority school weren't in-the-know. Why weren't they in-the-know? Probably for racist reasons going back decades.
A system that structurally disadvantages minorities based on race is racism. Why do you think that this one school had more black students? Legacies of housing discrimination.
There was resistance. My mother was hated by other parents for this and two other pieces of local activism. People in church told her that she was hurting their children straight to her face.
Could be, but almost every company I have encountered is desperate to hire good people and none of them cared at all about where I or anyone else I knew went to school.
What you are saying is consistent with the author's message: If they did not think they would pass the hiring bar, then they likely went there to check a box.
Some goddamned bleeding heart liberal who's stomping their constitutional rights to create a "fun company culture" full of Travis Kalanick-like sexual predator "good ole boy" tech bros - no doubt?
So someone society genuinely needs doing a job that genuinely needs to be forced on way too many shitty people.
Elitism is very much tied up with racism in America. To think that they are completely separate is exactly the sort of problem that we need to correct.
That's quite a dichotomy. Anyway, it's not about what I think, it's about what the recruiters thought. The recruiters probably thought (perhaps wrongly, I don't know) that they would find fewer good candidates at NC A&T. Remember: they have a monetary incentive to find good candidates.
I'm not sure that's a useful measure in the direction you think it is.
I have a few friends in academia here in .au - where the higher education system has been systematically defunded by a series of governments on both sides to the extent they're pretty much totally reliant of foreign students paying "full fees". I've heard stories of teachers being told they will be fired if they do not pass foreign student - even if their course attendance makes it blatantly obvious they can barely speak/write english and their handed in course work is blatantly plagiarised and/or ghostwritten. "Not failing" enough students looks a lot like poor academic standards and/or practice from where I sit.
(And it's quite likely a signal of endemic institutional racism as well. Duke don't enroll "the sort of student" who doesn't get private tutoring or who needs to, for example, work a part time job to support themselves through college. Which is why they're not a "HBCU"...)
You don’t have a clue about Duke and the students there, please stop speculating. Many of the kids work while there, most never had a tutor, and all of them are normal average Americans (and foreigners) in every way.
But, you know, they could have treated NC A&T students with respect, just in case, especially given the general problems with the U.S. news rankings as a heuristic for hirability.
But there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t treat a similar-caliber school the exact same way as NC A&T. Pointing to race as the reason is a very bold conclusion
The thing about a complex sociological phenomenon like systemic racial bias is that for each individual instance it is hard create a causal link. Yes, you can propose a lot alternate explanations for why this could have happened. The thing is, usually people writing anecdotes like this see them as connected to or emblematic of other experiences they and others have had. So, I think if you consider the evidence as a whole rather than each instance by itself, racial bias serves as a decent explanation for some of the observed effects.
Fucking thank you. I have no idea why I had to scroll so far to see this.
It’s Duke. They’re internationally known. Against some no-name state university. Of course they’ll try harder for the Duke students. It doesn’t matter if it’s Idaho State University, Oregon State University, or NC A&T, it’s not on the level of Duke.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] thread"Adding to the insult, [Will] Hayes finds himself at a distinct disadvantage in meetings that open with a case of mistaken identity. Venture capital is based on relationships, and investors aren’t typically primed to write a check when they feel unsettled. “You see it in the body language, you see it in the lack of questions and engagement,” says Hayes, 39. “They can’t wait for this meeting to get over.”
For nearly four years, Hayes would attend investor meetings alongside [longtime colleague] Messick, the former chief marketing officer at Lucidworks. VCs are trained to look for patterns in startup founders, Messick says, and there aren’t many Black Mark Zuckerbergs. 'Years and years of a Black guy and a White guy walking in the room, and the White guy is the CEO,' Messick says. 'Whether malicious, whether negligent, it was always awful.'"
Here's the post: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/16/for-black-ceos-in-sil...
How many non-black Zuckerbergs are there?
So to answer your question in the manner in which it was posed:
Most or nearly all of the Zuckerbergs are non-Black?
Isn't it well studied that homogenous environments are more trusting?
It may be that homogenity (and thus stronger interpersonal bonds) helps in that initial startup phase where everyone knows eachother.
If Zuckerberg ever runs for public office, he’s going to get sued if he doesn’t put the CEO hat down while in office doing official duties.
I personally think he should run just so he’s forced to answer unscripted questions live on tv. Much like the upcoming Congressional inquiries. Very interesting times.
You say that about zuck running for office but you've got Trump in that exact seat right now. He's forced to answer unscripted questions on TV and it makes no difference whatsoever. None.
It will matter to Zuckerberg personally because he doesn’t seem to rate well with some people, which isn’t necessary, but helps you get elected, generally. He seems to really care what people think about him in a value-neutral “we’re all just talking” kind of way, which actually isn’t a bad approach, but I want to see how he does live on stage with professional debaters. That’s essentially what Congress is these days: modern sedate mortal combat for American lives in our Colosseum, battles put on for the rich and famous while everyone else watches and cheers, watches and jeers, or scalps entry coins out front.
https://depts.washington.edu/chidint/journal/2015/03/glory-h...
Poorly communicated on my part then. I was alluding to "one too many Zuckerbergs" - in my opinion _any_ Zuckerberg (in terms of a single individual being totally in charge of something like FB) is one too many.
Jeff Bezos: $114 billion
Bill Gates: $106 billion
Warren Buffett: $80.8 billion
Mark Zuckerberg: $69.6 billion
Larry Ellison: $65 billion
Larry Page: $55.5 billion
Sergey Brin: $53.5 billion
Michael Bloomberg: $53.4 billion
Steve Ballmer: $51.7 billion
Jim Walton: $51.6 billion
"Historically black colleges and universities"
I graduated from State. What exactly about the tier of my undergrad and myself should I know?
Since you asked me, for some reason: that none of the rest of us are worried about it, and that some random unnamed company not recruiting there might not be something you need to worry about.
If you're worried the rankings which place Duke above your school are incorrect and you believe your CS program was as rigorous and useful as what the Duke students have, I can understand being frustrated by that. File under "life isn't fair."
I don't think anyone is going to defend the company in the story, for all the obvious reasons.
I didn't get into Duke. I'll remember that day for the rest of my life.
> You seem to tie your self worth to college prestige.
The fact that you seem to bring this up often makes me think you do too. It's honestly unnecessarily cruel.
From what I’ve seen there is a real difference in the rigorousness of the top 5/10 CS depts and then everyone else is relatively the same at large state universities.
What about NBA and NHL. I can only see Black and White.
This way the conservative and liberal prejudiced people can both hate that group equally, and for different reasons.
I had to practically threaten my best student (a female) to get her to go to a programming competition.
At which she proceeded to beat 80% of the teams by herself by answering 4 of the 10 problems outright. And then the rest of the team answered 2 more. They did quite well.
Her response: "That was fun. I'm pretty good at this."
<facepalm> Yeah, that's why I made you go.
I didn't shove her there because she was a female, I shoved her there because she was BY FAR the best student in my class. And the first time she showed up for a competition prep meeting, it was stupidly obvious just how much better she was than the rest of the team.
Some professor gave all of those students on the team a shove to get them there. Other professors had her as a student. None of them gave her a push to go do the competition. Why not?
That's the kind of thing that fills or drains the pipeline.
And that was college, a point where women finally aren't quite so worried about peer pressure. I imagine if I was teaching high school, I probably would have had to pull her parents in to exert enough pressure to make her go.
1) She was an amazingly good programmer relative to the field.
2) Programming competitions can be fun.
It's MY job as her senior to impart that knowledge.
The fact that no other professor imparted that knowledge is a problem--she should have had several professors imparting this knowledge. The fact this was not true shows that such things as "competition teams" are NOT meritocracies.
Though it could easily be a pipeline-to-the-school problem.
Maybe the best whites went to another school? Maybe only the best Asians came to the USA?
Short answer? Yes. Especially if you have an accent. Less so if you don't, however I face plenty of exactly what the author speaks of when I went to my predominantly black college next door to a powerhouse technology school
The firm this engineer is talking about did a recruiting trip to Duke (and UNC), like every big tech firm does. An hour away from Duke is the country's largest HBCU, NC A&T, which is included on the trip, ostensibly for inclusivity's sake.
The firm serves a catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session, which is held after class hours to ensure attendance. The next day, highly-ranked prospects from Duke/UNC are invited to a private dinner at a fine dining restaurant.
That same day, the firm holds an abbreviated meeting during class hours at A&T, where they serve (wait for it) the leftovers from the catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session.
Unfortunately, anonymity can breed some distrust in the content. By calling out the company by name, it may cause others who experienced the same to speak out too.
Cisco, at least at a time did invest in A&T and NC State, far more so than UNC which it didn’t recruit from for a period.
It gets trounced by Microsoft Teams. Teams! Think about that! The latecomer to the party that's actually turned into something pretty decent.
So I find it really hard to believe that anyone working on WebEx could possibly rate Cisco as a great place to work. A great place to sit around and do sweet F.A., maybe, whilst your userbase seethes and rages, but not a great place to work.
Wouldn't it.
(Because, ummmm, I find that very believable...)
If their idea of a diversity effort is pretending to recruit black students they must be callously insensitive, and to some degree consciously racist.
It was definitely an eye-opening moment for everyone in terms of realizing which department was the CEO's favorite.
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University
I'm sure there is some positive correlation between school ranking and quality of education but it seems too weak & there are so many exceptions for this 1 data point about a candidate to be given such weight. I'd absolutely take someone who went to Colorado State University & has 3 years of relevant job experience than someone fresh out of Stanford (all other things being equal).
Also almost every time I was involved in hiring we had more competent candidates to choose from than we had jobs to fill (with exception of the highest tier jobs, like searching for a Tech Director or CTO which nobody is giving to people fresh out of school anyway) so why do you even need to butter up the Duke grads? Are recent grads with no job experience so desirable in the US?
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-looked-at-how-a-thousand-coll...
During my undergrad years, there were people who made it out without programming in any language besides Java, and barely did any tech hobbies or independent programming outside of class. There were others who were constantly learning other languages, playing with random tech, and building small opens source tools and webapps.
I've met people who went through community collect programs who didn't understand basic BigO notation or algorithm optimization (no fault to them; it's just not taught in a lot of two year courses) and I've know people with only high school degrees who've picked up advanced CS books and would learn about compile theory and different types of parsing on their own for fun.
"needs improvement, did not finish course xyz"
Nah, your instructor's/TA's time is limited. I can't schedule 6 hours with them. I can't request as much time as I want. Colleges have other prerequisites which must be filled. The American systems don't let you go to college and do nothing but computers, and you must take time away from programming courses eventually. I can't maximize the time for programming, so, I'm limited to what I can put in. And if it's a tough college, it takes real effort to pass those other courses and you likely can't just coast. It's a forcing function with guidance.
If I put in a ton of time on my own to study stuff from the internet, that's the internet returning my investment of time and focus. It's got nothing to do with the college at that point.
I'm not as sure with TA's, partly because I often skipped the TA-sessions for various reasons.
Within the software industry there should be a negative correlation between school quality and performance as an employee. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox . People who are unqualified and unfit to do good work have been removed from the pool. Anyone in the pool who is unqualified must be fit to do good work.
Also, I like your point about CSU. I do a lot of hiring in the Boston area, and we have so many "second-tier" schools who produce absolutely excellent SEs. It might be trickle-down because of MIT here. Don't get me wrong, definitely hire MIT, but we also cherry-pick from Northeastern, WPI (my favorite), etc. with equally as good results.
I graduated in the mid 90s so I really don’t have a frame of reference. But, hypothetically speaking, if I had graduated in 2012 from the same no name college but spent a lot of time “grinding leetCode” and had the technical altitude to do well in the interview would they have even given me a chance?
Heck on my very sparse LinkedIn profile, it basically showed me as an enterprise C# CRUD developer and recruiters were reaching out to me from Facebook and Google even though I wouldn’t get through the first fifteen minutes of a technical phone screen for either without at least six months to a year of prep. Recruiters throw out a wide net.
That being said, after the local market tanked post Covid, and my unknown company with less than 50 people all in did an across the board pay cut, I threw a Hail Mary and applied for a remote job as a consultant for AWS. I had the experience and I knew it was going to be a remote interview so I took a chance and got in.
But would they have recruited interns from my no name college - even if I did try to give them some type of signal like side projects and an AWS cert?
Here in Berlin it seems the market for developers is as strong as ever, regardless of Corona.
My argument is basically the low-end of the jobs that someone who went to Princeton and excelled in computer science is willing to settle for is higher than the low-end of jobs that someone who went to a lesser-name school and excelled in computer science is willing to settle for.
In theory, if the difference in quality of education is enough, then the level of education that someone who excelled in computer science at Princeton vs someone who excelled in computer science at a lesser-name college would equal out this difference in expectations, but I don't think that is the case, at least when we are talking about high-end school vs mid-range school.
Moreover, in computer science especially there is a lot of self-learning. Someone who has done consistently better than their peers probably has a good talent for self-learning, even if the average of their peers is lower.
I think you get the same discount for quality when hiring weird people or people with odd job histories.
My general idea here is that if someone is less desirable in a way which you do not care about but where other companies might care about, they are probably going to be on average of higher quality than someone more conventionally desirable asking for the same salary range. Not saying this is an iron law, but I think it is a tendency.
If only someone could create a startup to break this industrial horseshit complex...
Have you considered open-sourcing the remains of Starfighter/Stockfighter as a set of breadcrumbs for the next founders who want to?
One of those is top 5%, the other is sub-50%. It seems a stretch to say the biggest problem the NC A&T group faced was not being invited to the right parties.
SAT isn't the be-all and end all, but those difference are far too large to be brushed aside. It is not at all obvious that race is the major factor here.
There is a case here that the recruiters were being realistic; the smart black candidates would presumably be working to get into some university other than NC A&T. The CS program entrants would need to look like legitimate geniuses compared to the average to qualify for red carpet treatment.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Agricultural_an...
Sometimes this means that someone graduating from a university with a decent degree when the average intake grades were comparatively low shows they are and are capable of outperforming to a greater extent. They don't have to evidence themselves as legitimate geniuses, just that they have the capacity to develop faster.
Obviously it then comes down to bias about whether the university is just scoring people higher, but that's a whole different ballgame.
Brand name universities still get the preferential treatment though, often because they have more developed alumni links with the hiring companies.
...but by then, you'd have crushed your early career and gone off and gotten a prestigious Master's Degree, or founded your own company and sold it to one of the bigger fish, earning your way into Sr Leadership...
And I suspect its the pipeline of people who end up in HR positions that is a problem as well.
See police brutality, me too, etc.
Today though? It does not fly. People know about it, and if they are not actively participating in stopping it, they are complicit - "not my problem, I don't care, blue/all lives matter, what about these crime statistics, muh freedom", these are all people that know about it but do not care, or they do care but they're on the wrong side.
However, like you, I am way of anecdotes and put more faith in empirical studies [1]. So what do the data say? Turns out they align with the lived experience of the author: widespread hiring bias by employers hurting Black people.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
Note, when looking at this literature: there is a huge publication bias. Publishing a paper that fits the popular (in social sciences) narratives is easy, publishing one that goes against them (like the one I linked) is hard and may well be career suicide. Also, the bar for what constitutes good enough science in these areas is very low.
The Occam’s Razor explanation for this is that the popular narratives are popular because most available evidence supports them.
The file-drawer effect is real and multifaceted, including political narrative strategy. If you don't think that editors consider this aspect of maintaining their journals' reputations, you are simply naive.
That seems like a bit of abuse of Occam's razor. Narratives are popularized by the general media, not scientists. Just compare how popular the idea that IQ is meaningless and not heritable is amongst the general population and the media compared to those who actually study the topic full time at universities.
Universities and people in them are not immune to pressure. Wasn't Hsu fired partly because he funded research into police shootings that ended up getting a politically incorrect result?
Authors of unpopular results (Rind et al anyone?) often get attacked a lot, their research subject to a disproportionate level of scrutiny and it's very career limitting (or is at least rumoured to be, which is plenty of a chilling effect).
Cesario and Johnson studied fatal shootings by police. Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings. That was only a small part of the case the graduate employee union presented against Hsu. The letter started by faculty[1] didn't mention it at all.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jb7w02E5GAdrJ_QnAokp7Ier...
I don't want to get too down into the weeds as my point is that people and the media have a big influence on what science gets done and what is career limitting. That said:
Most of the "case" was nonesense, with the actual letter (which had a fraction of the signatures of the counter-letter) being mostly guilt by association.
> Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings.
It was relevant because Floy was a police killing. Racial bias in police killings (the vast majority are with guns) was the main thing the protestors I've heard were protesting.
Only a small fraction of the signatures supporting Hsu have any affiliation with his university. And would you care which petition had more signatures if it was the other way around?
The protesters' demands for equity and police accountability aren't limited to fatal shootings or even all killings.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/racial-discrimination-americans...
Also sensitivity training isn't the best name. It practically writes its own insults. Maybe call it something like diversity promotion or anti-racism training. It's a lot harder to opt out to anti-racism training.
We all have blind spots. We need to erase them. Let's do it together.
What was the real story? Who knows.
Need I say it's not good to jump to conclusions.
But you have just attacked and doxed the author as well.
They chose not to name it for a reason.
No.
> doxed
Also no. His name and photograph are right there in the post.
The answer is probably complicated. I'd guess that India pushing tech in their education system is one factor. Indians and Asians are also a numerous and growing cohort, whose families are immigrating from higher populated regions. Their families may also encourage their children to go into tech. And the racist stereotypes these populations face are likely very different than others, such as African Americans.
It's that if you are Indian, you will not be allowed into the US unless you have a bachelor's in something leading into some high paying occupation. In fact, your odds are pretty bad unless you have a master's from an American university.
For Indian and Asian Americans, “their country” is the USA, and especially for Asian Americans, it's not uncommon that was true of their ancestors for several generations.
A large majority of Asian Americans are foreign born. The only groups that aren’t majority foreign born are the Japanese and Hmong.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/22/key-facts-a...
This is absolutely not true for "majority." A significant minority of them, this is probably true about, but a cursory review of how Chinese-Americans arrived to this country will probably dispel this rumor fairly quickly.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-c...
Because for Indians and other Asians, doing well in tech is one of the main ways of becoming Americans. If we kicked out all the current black people and then had employment-based immigrant and dual-intent visas as the main route for blacks to enter the country and start the road to citizenship, then once there were Black Americans again, they'd seem like a pretty darn successful demographic.
4% hold a doctorate, 17% a Master’s, 37% a Bachelor’s.
https://www.nairaland.com/5968663/nigerians-top-most-educate...
All career paths is probably a bit of a strawman. I doubt you'll find anyone here who expects same number of men and women in every job. The more dangerous ones will always be disproportionately picked by men and that's ok.
Yes, rich people can put their children through test prep courses. However, the differential impact is much less than what they can do with grades or even worse, extra-curriculars.
A bright, economically disadvantaged teen can do very well on a standardized test. That same teen has no way of doing an impressive non-profit over the summer in another country, as many wealthier Ivy League applicants do.
Tired of this narrative that if too many white people or men or white men work in a field or business then that is by default a sign of racism, sexism, or some kind of bigotry. Different groups of people broadly show interest in different careers.
I'm assuming you read the article, but it behooves you to state you did or didn't, since you seem to miss the point.
This article points out there were two recruiting events, with very different approaches. Two sets of engineers, one treated very differently.
Your comments just aren't relative to this conversation. They might be true, but don't disprove anything said in this article. They do seem to indicate you didn't read the article.
I went to a predominantly black city college right next door to Georgia Tech, so we got plenty of big companies knocking on our door.
Only they never took us seriously, gave rushed presentations, and never collected resumes. Tech? They got parties, dinners, entire clubs rented out. It was posh, and if you were like me - you figured out ways to get into these exclusive events, evade bouncers and find an engineer just to talk to them.
There are a few people in this comment section talking about how 'minorities and women simply skew differently'. Maybe try walking a mile in our shoes
Nobody has any trouble understanding that Duke is a higher-priority recruiting target than A&T.
I don't think I really agree that visiting HBCUs is racist tokenism unless it is 100% just to get diversity brownie points and nothing else: it's still better than not visiting them entirely and to provide opportunities to underrepresented minorities for which, while the intent is to put them into the corporate grinder, having a high-paying tech job is still a material benefit.
Without seeing how they treated students at a similarly ranked non-HBCU, it's difficult to distinguish racism from colorblind elitism. It's probably a bit of both racism and elitism, but without a comparably ranked school for comparison, I wouldn't be comfortable using the word "definitely".
Seriously? Did you _really_ just type that??? boggle!
Ok. If you are going to agree that the situation is almost certainly the result of at least implicit racism, and the alternatives are pretty unlikely then cool. You agree.
This is exactly why you can't reasonably accept treating one group of people differently - it might be a lazy recruiter half-ass'ing their job, but it might also be actual real racism. There's no way to tell by looking. The outcome is the same.
If you're willing to give them a pass you might just be enabling a racist.
A. What you'll have to do will depend in how finely you divide your population. E.g. recent african immigrant vs. Slave descended are quite different demographics with different life trajectories and you'll be able to tell one from another very easily. There will be huge political fights over these categories.
B. If you do hire based on population demographics then two things will happen: You'll get a bit more inefficient workplace due to unperforming workers. But more importantly, you'll be surrounding people with a bunch of Xers (whichever the underperfoming demographics is. Hillbillies? African Americans? Republicans? Left handed folk?) who are underperforming. This will cause a strong association in their mind that X=less capable. Xism will then increase.
The influx of women to my workplace really didn't help my colleague's sexism.
You think your employer shouldn't aim to be increase the diversity of your team because that'd make you racist?
Certainly the students should have been treated with much more respect. Multiple people clearly confused priority and respect. The two student bodies should have been treated with equal respect, but we can understand why they might not get equal priority. However, there's not enough evidence to rule out plain elitism for the lack of respect.
Besides, I do not really get why those dog&pony shows still exist in the first place.
You may have answered the question yourself. This is just a guess, but perhaps some employers see business value in those performances.
To provide special treatment is elitist at best, and racist and exploitative for PR points at worst.
And if the entire school doesn't pass the "hiring filter", stop going, and stop making false claims.
"Cisco, at least at a time did invest in A&T and NC State, far more so than UNC which it didn’t recruit from for a period."
Of course, there are no examples of elite black-dominated universities abutting poor white technical colleges, so it's not possible to look for an anecdote in the opposite direction here.
There's plenty of historic and systemic racism that keeps black people poorer and less educated. That's where people's outrage should be focused.
Also, diversity isn’t only about race, although it is also about that. It’s also about equal access. @AccessForAll on Twitter can probably help you much better than I can in that area.
https://juneteenthconf.com
Go out of your way to find underrepresented people (small town girls?) but raise the hiring bar slightly to accomodate for the interviee process error bars (if you're looking at a larger sample with a lower average using an error prone measuring device you'll get more people over the bar due to measurement error).
Turns out they were there to recruit drivers to drive for Uber.
Uber did attend the career fair for the CSE department however to recruit software engineers.
And it doesn't smell right that an organization would risk giving a bunch of candidates food poisoning and getting a lawsuit by serving them day-old catered food. I'm certainly willing to believe it could happen, but 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' - in this case I'd settle for him giving the name of the company so that either others can confirm, or they can rebut.
Attacking the person who is bringing the issue to light makes it seem like one is trying to distract from the issue being brought up, and put blame on the individual for talking about the problem.
> Pipeline problem, my ass.
after spending exactly no words refuting pipeline issues. I'm left to conclude that the author feels the two explanations are mutually exclusive and that by giving an anecdote about one, you can determine the other isn't real.
So it is not about rejecting the existence of a pipeline problem, it is instead to reject this as an excuse to ignore other real problems.
That is likely what the author was trying to say.
I pushed so hard for my employer, Sexy Unicorn Startup which said all the important things you expect a woke company to say, to recruit there. I told them I would set everything up and that all I needed was a budget. I got nothing but lip service.
So, HN, you want to do it the right way? I can be on A&T's campus in 15 minutes. I will connect you with the student orgs and help you do it the right way. You won't regret it. Email is in profile.
However, I really like the positive action of this comment.
(they present as rationalist and then do things like cherry pick evidence, is why I say semi-delusional)
Techies are so coddled that the very idea of interacting with a person with a wildly different background and communication styles is anxiety inducing, so they find a way around it.
The slights won't stop until you leave the comfort bubble, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
You're saying recruiting from different backgrounds (e.g. small town god fearing republican) could give my developers anxiety?
Hmm...
Guess I better avoid recruiting those sorts then.
Cisco or whoever may have been stopping by NC A&T to tick a box and therefore treated it perfunctorily. The author might also be exaggerating, it's certainly in his/her best interests. We all might do well to avoid drawing any conclusions from anecdote.
The author was trying to put it on the same level as Duke/UNC in order to paint a picture that the only possible reason for the perfunctory treatment was racism. But NC A&T is not on the same level. "Hooli" is almost certainly elitist, but this anecdote is not good evidence for systemic racism.
Author here. I wasn’t implying that A&T is perceived to be as “prestigious” or highly ranked as Duke. I’m just trying to say that it was certainly worth visiting and worth taking seriously. If you’re looking for black engineers, for whatever reason, it’s reasonable to reach for A&T. Now, you can’t claim a pipeline problem if you’re pretty much ignoring the places where you’re most likely to find your target demographic.
Let’s just drop the words “racism” and other “-isms” since they seem to trigger people and become distracting from the point. What the recruiters did by phoning it in for A&T and focus on Duke was miss out on potentially excellent engineers from A&T and reinforce the demographics found at Duke/UNC. The recruiters made an assumption based on some model they built at Hooli and other companies like it and didn’t do their job, which was to FIND good talent.
I’ve worked at “elite” companies with people from “elite” schools. I’ve also worked with people from no school. There are smart people all over the place, so we don’t need to look at the same 10 schools and ignore the people who didn’t take out a $75k student loan.
That being said, you could say that recruiters might "miss out on excellent engineers by not visiting _____", where the blank is any one of thousands of schools in the US. In this particular case, it seems like an instance of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" – in general, a recruiter is just gonna look better if they recruit talent from top-rated school than from lower rated ones.
To me, the solution is to stop recruiting on college campuses in general if the job in question doesn't actually require a degree in order to perform it.
I just think there’s not enough pressure on these companies to rework how they do interviews, since nobody believes that they’d actually get higher quality candidates.
In general there's an extremely strong belief in the bay area that it's not worth considering graduates of schools outside the top as being worth considering.
That's how you end up with entire companies treating the entire middle of the US as "flyover country."
First off, big feeder schools, the Dukes and UNCs of the world, they have extremely sophisticated internal career programs that throw out the red carpet for us when we arrive. Yes we order the food (and its usually pizza), but they literally do all the pre-work and advertise for us, give us the floor and make sure we have the best chances to meet their students. They schedule the program and the times for us, so we just roll in, present, and then have lots of meet and greet with the students.
Second, recruiters only have so much time and energy to meet with students, so they have to go to places with the least friction. The recruiters live by the rule, meet that quota or you're out! So that translates to, schools better have students who can pass the interview process, or they are out.
My company has a huge list of diversity schools that we actively recruit from. This goes against the rules above and requires special recruiters who aren't being tracked against the same quota system. Why? Although these diversity schools produce highly qualified candidates, their career programs aren't sophisticated enough, nor is the coursework aligned with the goal of getting these students into silicon valley tech jobs.
Remember, at a very real level, you're competing for the same jobs at the same level as someone graduating from CMU or MIT. If your CS department isn't preparing you for what's ahead, you have to make that knowledge-gap up on your own.
Change isn't free - the question is if companies are willing to spend time and resources for it. Every time a company does this, they have put a price on their acceptance of the problem. For some companies that's a needed survival choice. There are many that are choosing to not fix the problem and instead focus on Wall Street numbers or similar, even though they clearly have enough profit/funding to invest in this societal problem.
Duke University: 10th
North Carolina A&T: >600th
While the author tries to frame the university as "a damn good one", in reality it probably isn't.
The treatment looks to me like people (or the firm) felt obligated to show up but not obligated to put much effort in or to expect to recruit anyone. If they are running a recruiting event with little expectation of recruiting, does that not agree with the article’s view that the event was solely paying lip service to diversity.
a) being visited and disrespected
b) not being visited at all
c) being visited and treated with some respect
All the bad historically white universities wouldn't get an event at all.
What, exactly, do you think my class of CS grads should do when recruiting?
Apply like regular people and pass the interviews.
Nevertheless if the details of this story are true this company might have well not bothered visiting.
Whenever I set a benchmark for tone-deafness someone eventually swoops in and makes me re-evaluate it.
Most likely, yes. In the US news rankings, Duke is #10 and UNC is #20. NC A&T is #281.
NC A&T has a 46% graduation rate vs Duke's 95%.
Duke engineering is ranked #20, NC A&T is #134.
These schools just aren't in the same league.
"Hooli didn't treat a low ranked school as well as they did an extremely high ranked school, must be racism."
I could agree that more recruiting resources should be dedicated towards higher ranking schools, but food scraps and half-hearted presentations just for PR points falls wayyy below just "lower resources".
Would you rather just not have a company show up, or have a recruiter essentially treat you like a dog?
* Research reputation
* # of publications, conferences, books
* # of citations
* # of highly cited papers
Where's quality of teaching? Where's student employability after graduation? Where's numbers of student internships? Where's teacher to student ratio? None of these matter to most university ranking lists.
Duke student-faculty ratio is 6:1. NC A&T is 18:1.
Duke is #17 in Best Undergraduate Teaching. Seems for NC A&T that info is paywalled.
Duke is #8 in Co-ops/Internships. This might also be paywalled for NC A&T.
Duke acceptance rate is 9%. NC A&T is 61%.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/duke-university-2920/ov...
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/north-carolina-at-2905/...
To teaching:
> The Best Undergraduate Teaching rankings are based solely on the responses to this separate section of the 2019 peer assessment survey.
So you have a bunch of high up academic deans being asked to rank teaching at hundreds of schools. This just boils down to name brand and is not a representation of teaching quality.
Same goes for the methodology for co-op's/internships if you read up there. It's all a self fulfilling prophecy of prestige.
Class size, yeah that's a real metric, but there are a decent deal of large schools with known CS programs with large classes near that 18:1 - why haven't those been eliminated from recruiting?
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/university-of-michigan-...
Can you provide evidence of this.
> Structural racism runs deep.
What makes you think Duke is some all-white club. I went to Duke and there were lots of African-American students. My guess is that Duke has among the most Affirmative Action of any school.
Partly because to deny structural racism is itself racist therefore strengthening ones case innately, but mainly because as it does really exist so there would always be some influence and something that's in the news right now so it's a fashionable concept to attach any blame on.
Also it gives good social credit to mention it in case people with power over ones career or future question one. It really is a no brainer, we should use it more often.
I'm not being sarcastic here, the benefits of blaming structural racism for complex causes far exceeds any costs of not doing so.
I’ve experienced a small example of this. In elementary school the majority minority school in the district sent basically no kids to the gifted magnet school. Like zero. For years, people just said what you said. My parents actually dug into it and found that grade distributions were similar and the problem was that administrators at the white schools knew how to write glowing recommendations and the admin at the other school didn’t exaggerate as much. A little bit of coordination and adjusting the recommendation letter form structure and bam suddenly way more kids from the majority minority school.
But for years people just said “well that’s a worse school, what do you expect”.
There was resistance. My mother was hated by other parents for this and two other pieces of local activism. People in church told her that she was hurting their children straight to her face.
Most probably, someone forced them to have this box.
So someone society genuinely needs doing a job that genuinely needs to be forced on way too many shitty people.
GC is saying it was more likely elitism, which is not the same thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23935650
Or do you think those students are just stupid?
They seem clearly bogus in that they're by English-speaking press and happen to rate all the English-speaking universities top.
And if they're dumb in that way, probably they're dumb in other ways I haven't thought of too, right?
Is there some real signal in there?
USNWR only ranks US universities. It’s not a world ranking. It doesn’t even include foreign in passport only Canada.
It does make my criticism irrelevant in this case, good point.
I'm not sure that's a useful measure in the direction you think it is.
I have a few friends in academia here in .au - where the higher education system has been systematically defunded by a series of governments on both sides to the extent they're pretty much totally reliant of foreign students paying "full fees". I've heard stories of teachers being told they will be fired if they do not pass foreign student - even if their course attendance makes it blatantly obvious they can barely speak/write english and their handed in course work is blatantly plagiarised and/or ghostwritten. "Not failing" enough students looks a lot like poor academic standards and/or practice from where I sit.
(And it's quite likely a signal of endemic institutional racism as well. Duke don't enroll "the sort of student" who doesn't get private tutoring or who needs to, for example, work a part time job to support themselves through college. Which is why they're not a "HBCU"...)
It’s Duke. They’re internationally known. Against some no-name state university. Of course they’ll try harder for the Duke students. It doesn’t matter if it’s Idaho State University, Oregon State University, or NC A&T, it’s not on the level of Duke.