Silicon Valley Still Wrestling With Diversity Issues 398
An anonymous reader writes: As major tech companies come under increased scrutiny over the diversity of their workforces, many of them are focusing solely on the "pipeline" of workers educated in a computer-related field. They're pouring resources into getting kids to code, setting up internships, and even establishing mentoring programs for underrepresented groups. But experts say they're still failing to root out their own internal biases when making hiring decisions. "That bias shows up in recruiting, with companies drawing from the same top universities, where black and Hispanic graduates are still lagging behind other groups. ... The problem is particularly acute at start-ups, where black founders are just 1 percent of venture-invested firms, according to a 2011 survey by CB Insights." The tech companies are under mounting pressure to solve this problem, and the solutions they're pursuing won't show results quickly.
Silicon Valley Isn't Wrestling with it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Silicon Valley Isn't Wrestling with it (Score:3, Insightful)
I know a lot of companies pay lip service to the unquantifiable "benefits of diversity", but that doesn't mean tech companies are now a social program to artificially inflate minority numbers.
Especially since nowadays, there are often as many or more minority employees of all sorts of backgrounds (Jewish, all flavors of Asian, just not the "disadvantaged" minorities) than there are "white" (which is bullshit anyways,
Re: Silicon Valley Isn't Wrestling with it (Score:4, Interesting)
At lower levels there is a lot of diversity. At upper levels though it becomes very white. Not always, solidly white, but it is a distinct difference.
This Social Justice fad ought to be over soon. (Score:4, Interesting)
Based on my calculations, this Social Justice fad ought to be over pretty soon.
It's following the same trajectory as other online fads, like Ruby on Rails and NoSQL, have followed.
Ruby on Rails first became available late 2005, but it wasn't until 2006 that it really started picking up steam. It was between 2006 and 2011 when was really hyped, and it has been totally downhill since then. As of 2015, Ruby on Rails is generally laughed at, as are the people who advocated for it. Many of them have jumped ship to other hyped projects, namely Rust. So Ruby on Rails lasted about 5 years before faltering.
NoSQL followed the exact same trajectory. Cassandra was released in 2008, and Redis and MongoDB was released in 2009, and by 2014 was widely considered a bad idea. Just like Ruby on Rails, it had a 5 year lifespan.
The online Social Justice fad is following the same trajectory as those fads did, too. It really picked up steam during mid 2009, when the whole GoGaRuCo presentation affair. It combined a Ruby conference, with a NoSQL presentation, and alleged sexism. Unlike the others, it has gone more mainstream with KONY 2012 and various other "controversies", which I think will lengthen its lifespan somewhat. But we're still nearing the end of what appears to be its 5 to 7 year lifespan.
Social Justice is now at the point where it's being used by the market departments of various web sites and organizations to garner attention (see Slashdot and Reddit as examples of this). These are usually the last people to pick up on a fad, and are among the last to benefit from it before the fad falls flat on its face.
So it looks more and more likely that this Social Justice fad will soon go the way of the Ruby on Rails and NoSQL fads. It'll become a relic of a past when sensibility was temporarily lost.
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Re:This Social Justice fad ought to be over soon. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Social Justice" is a leftist program of long standing that will not go away.
The wider campaign for "social justice" is not a fad and is not going away, mainly because there really is a lack of social justice in the world. But the particular fad of "gender discrimination in tech" is dying. When the issue first came up, there was intelligent debate, and reasonable people argued on both sides of the issue. No more. It has become clear that the tech companies have little control over the composition of the tech labor pool, or the tech education pipeline. Many of the SJWs' pet projects, like steering more young girls into tech, have failed. There is now a strong backlash, and articles like this one are mostly subjected to contemptuous ridicule, with only a few trolls pretending to agree with the SJWs.
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Or equally rich, depending on which side of the social divide you started from.
Re:This Social Justice fad ought to be over soon. (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you really think that all the slacktivists that participated in KONY 2012 and other campaigns, which accomplished little beyond allowing the participants to pat themselves on the back about how great and progressive they were, are comparable to individuals who devoted their lives to helping others and pushing for equality?
There are still plenty of individuals who are fighting for change, and facing far more adversity than I think most of us could handle [wikipedia.org]. I can't imagine many here not being supportive of such people. But then you have the modern American Social Justice movement that is more concerned with self-promotion and using problems as a vehicle for their own ends [wikipedia.org] rather than solving any problems. That's who the people here are complaining about. Letting those people attach themselves to the social justice movement and then defending them when they make an awful mess of things does not help achieve social justice.
Condemning the charlatans is not the same as condemning the entire movement or its past history.
Re:This Social Justice fad ought to be over soon. (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that there did used to be a lot more overt injustice is making a lot of people angry and resentful of any suggesting that there still might be a problem. This observation explains about 75% of Slashdot posts on the subject.
I don't think there's anyone who would claim that everything is perfect and I think the resentfulness is coming from having the same story pushed again and again. It would be one thing to argue that women and minorities in Silicon Valley are being paid less, but it's another to argue that not having a workforce that's exactly equal to the general population shows a lack of diversity. It would be rather silly to accuse the NFL, NBA, MLB, or NHL of struggling with diversity, and yet all of those have as much of an aberration as the tech field.
Also, you have to consider that from a man's perspective, merely being labeled a sexist at all, whether or not it is true is possibly career ending. Look at the recent shit-show controversy surrounding Tim Hunt or Matt Taylor for good examples of how out of hand it has gotten. The people who took offense and sounded their outrage are the reason there's such a backlash and why people don't even want to broach the subject. Most people aren't going to blow it up into a big deal, much like most people won't abuse you in a relationship, or most people aren't going to mug or assault you on the street, but it really only takes one to completely turn your life upside down.
When you have that kind of atmosphere, it's not conducive to debate at all. Even if you and I are both reasonable, it doesn't stop some third party from driving by and make accusations because what someone said doesn't jibe with their beliefs. There are some who would call me a racist and others who would like you as some kind of feminazi for yours just for daring to take sides.
So there is a massive push back against efforts to get diversity in tech, because if tech is doing badly then people in tech must be bad people, right? And I'm not a bad person, so the claim that there is a problem must be wrong.
I think a lot of the push back occurs because the solutions presented by the people who tend to take on these causes are unlikely to work. First they rest on the notion that a deviation from some magical number suggests that there is a problem rather than looking at whether qualified minorities are being treated worse. Here's a relevant quote from Thomas Sowell:
The idea that large statistical disparities between groups are unusual—and therefore suspicious—is commonplace, but only among those who have not bothered to study the history of racial, ethnic, and other groups in countries around the world. Among leading scholars who have in fact devoted years of research to such matters, a radically different picture emerges. Donald L. Horowitz of Duke University, at the end of a massive and masterful international study of ethnic groups—a study highly praised in scholarly journals—examined the idea of a society where groups are “proportionately represented” at different levels and in different sectors. He concluded that “few, if any, societies have ever approximated this description.”
However, the new wave of social justice sees this as a violation of a core tenet of their faith and therefore anyone who believes such a thing must be a racist. But let's assume that their belief is actually correct for the sake of argument. The article would still suck as it tends to suggest a top-down solution, in that a diversity problem in tech can be solved by simply hiring more minorities. Even if hiring standards are lowered to give preference to minorities, there simply aren't enough available candidates. Worse yet, it's likely to create even more racism/sexism/etc. as you can't expect your workforce to respect someone who was only hired to fill some kind of quota and honestly I can't say I would feel all that comfortable working
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You also commit the same fallacy (along with ad hominem) that you accuse me of by claiming that I'm a member of group X when I'm not. There's another reason the Slash
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Mostly other white people in my area. Of course my area is stocked right full of illegal immigrants but they are white, and Canadian, so nobody cares. The only time we have any non-white illegal immigrants (and I am only told they are illegal, I am not so crass as to go checking IDs) is during the blueberry and apple harvests. The potato harvest is still done by white kids (and poor adults) who even get two weeks off from school to do so if they are "up in the county." There is some negative consequences.
Th
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Comparing early advocates for social change and progressive policies with the current group typically associated with "Social Justice" is a bit like saying that African Americans should still be voting Republican.
How has 50 years of voting exclusively for Democratic candidates been working out for the African American community?
In fairness how well has voting for any party been working for anyone in the last 50 years?
Women don't want the work (Score:5, Interesting)
A bunch of SJWs are wrestling with it. Silicon Valley is doing just fine.
When women wanted to become doctors, they fought their way into med school, fought to earn a proper education, fought for credentials, and fought for equal standing amongst male doctors. When women wanted to become lawyers, they similarly fought their way through the system. Same goes for every other job women wanted to do. Women fought their way to get the jobs they wanted. Some of those fights took decades.
In tech, jobs require less qualifications than working as a doctor or lawyer. You don't need to spend years getting a masters, PhD, or going through a post-doc program. The pay for high-end IT workers can reach the same amount as the pay for low-end doctors or lawyers. The work environment in IT is often better than what doctors or lawyers encounter. Yet, tech companies can't give away the jobs to US women.
Why? Answer that question and you get to the root of the problem.
Women like to help. They'll help people, animals, forests, the environment, etc. But in general, they're not interested in working with machines. Machines don't need help. They don't care about making the next hipster app. They could care less about the coolest new programming language. They don't give a shit about all the things that cause religious wars in the tech community.
Most women don't want tech jobs because they find the work meaningless. Having done a great deal of the work myself, I'd also throw in soul-crushing. I've spent years developing apps for companies that ultimately went bankrupt. The product of my years of work? Gone. Thrown away. Has my work actually helped anyone? Hard to say. Probably not. Definitely not directly. Not in any meaningful sense. Say, I spend 3 months improving the performance of an app. Then users login half a second shorter. Big whoop. Do users even notice? Do they care? No, probably not. Does it really improve their lives? Definitely not.
When tech companies start doing truly meaningful work, then women will beat down their doors. Until then, all this effort to attract women won't matter.
Re:The root of the problem. (Score:4, Informative)
The root of the problem isn't what you seem to think it is. The root of the problem is that guys like you continue to push bullshit like
Women like to help. They'll help people, animals, forests, the environment, etc. But in general, they're not interested in working with machines.
Women, it was once believed, didn't have the constitution to be doctors. Women, it was once held true, didn't possess the analytical minds required for a career in the law. Women could do without your sexist arse telling them what they are and aren't, and what they can and can't do.
Gender studies promotes the idea that men and women are exactly the same except for our genitalia. This assertion or hypothesis hasn't been shown true by actual science conducted by biologists. In fact, studies by actual biologists show the opposite. The brain controls hormone levels. The amount of testosterone in the bloodstream effects whether a child is interested in traditionally male-oriented or female-oriented toys. This is has been shown true for children as young as one day old. That's before a child has any chance of getting corrupted by societal influences.
Further, studies across 53 societies show that as cultures grow more egalitarian and allow men and women to do whatever job they like, we actually see more men doing traditionally male jobs and more women doing traditionally female jobs. It's only in less equal societies where men and women face unequal choices of work where we see men and women doing largely the same kinds of work. Were the differences in preference of job only a difference in culture, then we should also see different results in different cultures. That isn't the case. When given the choice, men almost always prefer traditionally male jobs and women traditionally female jobs. That suggests a biological difference between the preferences of men and women for the kind of work they prefer to do.
Here's a good video on these facts. Although, whoever posted the video to Youtube definitely should have chosen a better title. I suggest watching the whole thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: Silicon Valley Isn't Wrestling with it (Score:3)
I run a dev team in SV and I absolutely wrestle with diversity issues every day. We try to maintain diversity of talent, skills, ideas, approaches, tech stacks, work hours and God know what else.
What we don't really care about is diversity of genitalia, skin colors or funny accents, as this doesn't contribute fuck all to what we want to get done.
Too many white and Asian males (Score:4, Insightful)
How can we hire fewer white and Asian males? Any ideas?
Re: Too many white and Asian males (Score:3, Insightful)
Lower your hiring standards.
Blacks make 4% of CS grads from top colleges... (Score:2)
Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don't get hired [usatoday.com]
I don't understand why so many are not willing to even consider that there is some bias against minorities in tech hiring.
Re:Blacks make 4% of CS grads from top colleges... (Score:5, Informative)
...but make up 1% of most top SV hires.
Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don't get hired [usatoday.com]
This article is comparing graduation rates today with a labor pool hired over the last 30 years. The fair comparison would be to look at only new hires directly from universities. But the author is likely more interested in pushing an agenda than in presenting the facts.
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Get some better HR people.
Good luck with that!
Re: Too many white and Asian males (Score:5, Insightful)
Get some better HR people.
Good luck with that!
Only dysfunctional organizations allow HR people to make hiring decisions. HR's job is to do the paperwork, not decide who to hire. Hiring smart people with a track record of accomplishments is a core competency of any successful company. If you have some HR admin drone reading engineer resumes, you are going to fail.
When I hire someone, I go to HR to get the position and salary range approved. Then I write the ad, I read the resumes, I do the interviews, I make the offer, I negotiate the salary, and at the end of that process, I go to HR and tell them "I just hired this engineer, so put her info into payroll." If your company does it significantly different, you have a problem.
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I work for a huge corp and HR does everything regarding hiring. You just put in a request for a developer with a,b,c skills and later you get invited to 2nd interviews with HR present. (the first interview is HR only)
Can you please post your employer's stock symbol, so I can short their stock?
Re:Too many white and Asian males (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple. Just establish that you are bigoted against white and asian males, and that you won't hire any more. Lower your work standards to accommodate whichever demographics you prefer to work with, then sit back and watch your stock values plummet.
Diversity does not imply "lowered standards" (Score:2)
Re:Diversity does not imply "lowered standards" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not so much an ASSumption, as it is an observation. Corporations tend to hire the most qualified people. Corporations, as opposed to small businesses, simply cannot afford to show prejudice for one demographic over another. Who are corporations hiring? Let us get this straight now - they are hiring the MOST QUALIFIED PEOPLE, who also happen to mostly be WHITE AND ASIAN MALES.
By necessity, making your labor poll more inclusive means lowering standards.
BTW - it has already been pointed out that the Asian males are significantly over represented in Sillycone Valley, whereas white males are closer to "normal". That's probably a result of "No Retard Left Behind" and the Core curriculum. Our schools are being dumbed down, so fewer white males are able to excel.
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... and don't you go and question their courage in transgender transracial transidentity.
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However, I don't think that the people who push that point of view would agree that in order to i
Is this Jezebel or Slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Serious question...
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What do you have against discussing a problem that affects many tech professionals globally? Should Slashdot only discuss issues that affect Caucasian males?
Re:Is this Jezebel or Slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)
What do you have against discussing a problem
The lack of any evidence that said problem actually exists. Start with a survey of what jobs women and men actually prefer doing. That's the first step in empirically proving that sexism exists, but feminists refuse to do such research because it will debunk their anecdotal claims. Norway knows what's up. [youtube.com] The most equal countries in the world have greater gender differences, esp. in job selection. What you're calling a "problem" is the fact that women have more freedom to express their choice in job preference. I suppose your "solution" would be less choice, maybe forcing women and men into jobs they do not want? Something akin to Communism? (indeed, here we reveal the true nature of the social justice warrior beast) [youtube.com] Behavioural differences between men and women are cross-cultural (meaning: not socialized). [wikipedia.org]
In short: There is no evidence a problem exists. Should we be hemming and hawing over the alleged existence of a teapot orbiting between here and Mars? Never mind that there is no evidence for its existence, let's waste time discussing the question of who could have put it there? Just because SJW whines about something that allegedly affects women doesn't mean we should engage our gynocentric bias and suddenly declare that correlation is suddenly causation. Hint: The SJW does not want to admit that any "issues facing women" have been addressed, as this means their job is over. For instance, see how SJW "rape culture" hysteria has removed an alarming amount of due process. [human-stupidity.com] According to SJWs none of the drastic changes we have made has done anything to cure the problem they claim still exists -- they seek MORE erosion of rights to address their baseless accusations.
In other words: Once you pay the Danegeld, you will never be rid of the Dane.
P.S. The wage gap hasn't existed in over half a decade. [youtube.com]
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Diversity is not an issue, the ONLY thing they should care is competence.
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It is an issue because race doesn't correlate with competence. Therefore if you have one race being under-represented you know that there are many potentially great candidates from that race that you are failing to hire, instead settling for a potentially worse candidate from some other race.
Companies see it as a way to get the best employees and get ahead in a very competitive market, where the ability to innovate and built strong products is key. They see lack of diversity as a failure to develop and attr
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"It is an issue because race doesn't correlate with competence."
[citation needed]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The bottom line is that even if there is still some debate in this area, the margins are tiny and averaged over populations. Individuals don't seem to be limited by their race, and certainly not to the point where you could say that only a small fraction of non-white people are qualified to compete for tech jobs with white people.
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You originally said competence, not intelligence. You're moving the goalposts.
Competence has a huge training component which is not necessarily tied to intelligence. If the culture of one demographic keeps them from pursuing higher education or attending top schools, they will ultimately be less competent as a demographic. This may translate into a correlation between race and competence and still may not be the result of any racism from outside that demographic.
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You are missing the point. If the only difference is in opportunities in life for training then not checking to see if those candidates have that training is limiting the pool of good candidates unnecessarily.
So while what you say may be true in some areas, it only applies to populations and not individuals.
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Can you rephrase that coherently please? What is an HR person to do about a candidate that had a "difference in opportunities in life for training" from another candidate, and therefore varies in competence?
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It's pretty easy to understand, try to wrap your head around it. Even if a population is generally disadvantaged that doesn't mean than an individual can't overcome that and become highly competent. Therefore not properly checking for good candidates in the population potentially excludes the best candidates. That's why companies are trying hard to avoid doing it.
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So now we're completely away from the "race / competence non-correlation", and onto the "judge each person on his/her own merits" bromide. I'm 100% with you there. I also like motherhood and apple pie.
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As a population, African Americans produce more good basketball players and fewer good computer scientists than the population at large. That is neither surprising nor does it require racism or discrimination as an explanation. In fact, as a population, African Americans also have a lower average IQ even though race does not, b
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Correct: your race doesn't limit your potential IQ per se. But that is after correcting for a lot of other historical and environmental variables.
But Silicon Valley employers don't hire newborn babies drawn at random from the world population, they hire adults drawn from the US population. Within the US population, for historical, cultural, and environmental reasons, race does correlate strongly with competence in particular fields. Nor is this at all uniqu
Re: Huh? (Score:2)
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Ah, there is your error: race is, in fact, is highly correlated (both positively and negatively) in many fields. The relationship isn't genetic, it's environmental and historical, but that doesn't make it any less real.
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And what happens when competent minority kids never get the chance to show this because of social issues that exists decades before they were born?
The situation is clearly not that simple. People have biases.
Job seekers with black sounding names get interviewed less. Black job seekers with photos get interviewed less.
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Diversity is not an issue, the ONLY thing they should care is competence.
Diversity is an issue, and it's an issue many politicians care about.
Specifically, it's an issue for politicians that Google and Facebook want to influence with their lobbying. Making noise about the issue is an easy way for them to make those politicians happy, to say, "I am on your side."
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
FUD (Score:3, Informative)
This is patently untrue. The Blacks and Hispanics combined make 3% of the tech workforce, but do make over 30% of the remainder. If it were that much of a chore to fire minorities wouldn't the issue present itself in lower paying jobs as well?
There is no evidence to support that it is hard to fire minority employees. Please do not make things up.
Re: FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
This is patently *absolutely* true. I, my wife, and my friends have all directly observed this happening, right out in the open. It doesn't happen with all "disadvantaged" employees, but with problem employees who use their political status as a weapon and veiled lawsuit threat against HR.
To be crystal-clear, I and others close to me have explicitly heard sentences of the form "we can't fire him/her; it's not worth the lawsuit," spoken aloud, by decision-makers, clearly as a matter of policy and not as an off-hand crack, more times than can be considered a fluke.
These "poison pill" employees are a minority among minorities, but they definitely exist, and they ruin things for everyone.
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There is no evidence to support that it is hard to fire minority employees.
Except of course for the fact that if you fire someone who belongs to a "disadvantaged" group (not just minorities), in most states they can bring you before a Human Relations Committee which will require you to prove that you did not fire them because they belonged to that group. They do not have to present any evidence that that was the reason they were fired.
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If they only cared about competence, you would see a closer match to the diversity numbers of the pipeline. But you don't see that, so they probably don't.
Actually, from the numbers I've seen there is a pretty good match to the diversity numbers of the pipeline. Minority representation in major SV tech companies is pretty close to the representation among university graduates in the relevant fields. I think it's pretty clear that the problem -- and there is a problem -- is in the pipeline, not in the hiring policies.
A colleague of mine (I work for Google) spent last year teaching at a predominantly-black university (on Google's dime), as part of an initiat
Real bias? (Score:3)
Is this the usual screaming about bias without actually measuring any?
Statistics are not that hard to find... (Score:2)
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley-diversity-tech-hiring-computer-science-graduates-african-american-hispanic/14684211/ [usatoday.com]
If you want measurements you don't have to go very far.
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That's not evidence of bias, it's evidence of unequal outcomes. Unequal outcomes have lots of causes other than bias.
Where are they? (Score:2)
Where are all of these women/minorities, WITH TECH DEGREES, unable to find jobs?
I had to get a tech degree before anyone would let me touch their computers, why shouldn't they?
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Where are all of these women/minorities, WITH TECH DEGREES, unable to find jobs?
From TFA:
But fresh data show that top schools are turning out black and Hispanic graduates with tech degrees at rates significantly higher than they are being hired by leading tech firms.
So, er, yes, it would appear.
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Are they turning them out at the same level though? Big universities discriminate like crazy, and will let weaker candidates in their pipelines in computer science if they're female or black much more easily. Some of them will do fine, but a lot will only barely squeeze through, because they were not really qualified in the first place.
Then they'll just fail all the interviews once trying to get jobs.
If leading tech firms hired at a lower rate after adjusting for universities' lower admission criteria for t
Proof?... (Score:2)
Do you have any proof to back that up? Citations? Recent published accounts? Or are we suppose to believe your racist banter as is.
Many of us went to top universities. D
Re:Proof?... (Score:5, Informative)
Have you been living under a rock? There have been SCOTUS cases about this. Yes, colleges and universities lower their standards for African Americans and have stricter requirements for Asian Americans. And the African Americans that are admitted are served poorly by this kind of affirmative action: they do worse than if they had gone to lesser institutions and (apparently) don't get hired at the same rates afterwards either.
http://priceonomics.com/post/4... [priceonomics.com]
Why don't you tone down your own racist banter and get some facts?
Serious breach of ediquette (Score:4, Insightful)
Fridays are the traditional days for Dice SJW clickbaiting.
welcome to reality (Score:5, Insightful)
That bias shows up in recruiting, with companies drawing from the same top universities, where black and Hispanic graduates are still lagging behind other groups
Well, that really says everything, doesn't it?
A lot of tech companies rely on degrees, and most of them have their favorite universities where candidates generally have the skills and personalities that make an easy fit. Employing alums from the same schools has an instant effect on that "fit" part of the job -- they've all had similar experiences and can relate to each other much more readily. This is not unique to tech, but it could be exacerbated by it.
Once again, it comes back to the pipeline. If you can't get girls, Blacks, Hispanics, and whatever-ics, through the top tier education system, then maybe that's where you need to start. Not with affirmative action, however.
I will never hire someone because they are black, or are female, or whatever. That doesn't make any sense to me. I hire people that I think are capable of doing the job, because with each additional pair of hands on keyboards below me, adds to the overall expectation on me. I want people who are going to help me win, not someone who got the position because society feels sorry for them (and I don't think any genuine person wants society to feel sorry for them).
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The wrong end of the problem (Score:3)
The problem starts in the homes and schools of this country. If you want more minorities and women in tech then the interest in this field has to be stimulated early in life. There must be support from the homes and schools for learning and experimenting with science and tech. By the time people have reached hiring age that battle is over. If they don't have the interest or skills then they aren't going to be a resource in the tech industry.
Supply side and demand side issues (Score:2)
Weak Premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on, now:
If I were running a business, then I would also want to hire people from the top universities. They're probably better educated and prepared. If I want to hire the best people that's where I would go. I don't run the universities, and I don't decide who applies to them. How is this in any way a bias problem from the companies in SV?
These SJW articles are getting weaker and more desperate by the minute.
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These SJW articles are getting weaker and more desperate by the minute.
FromTFA:
But fresh data show that top schools are turning out black and Hispanic graduates with tech degrees at rates significantly higher than they are being hired by leading tech firms.
What's weak about that?
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These SJW articles are getting weaker and more desperate by the minute.
FromTFA:
But fresh data show that top schools are turning out black and Hispanic graduates with tech degrees at rates significantly higher than they are being hired by leading tech firms.
What's weak about that?
You know, you have really poor science skills. The production of the resource as measured by the first limited group highlighted above is not exclusively consumed by the second limited group highlighted above, and the consumption of the resource as measured by the second limited group highlighted above is not exclusively constrained to the first limited group above.
The quoted statement is extremely weak and misleading to the point of dishonesty. It gives the impression that their data suggests that leading
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How about simply hiring the people most qualified to do the job? That would probably be from the top schools but not necessarily. They still have to be able to do the job. History repeats itself particularly when people don't learn from history. Case in point, the early chemical engineering industry in the early 20th century. The guy who, in trying to create quinine artificially, ended up creating the world's first artificial dye was a Brit. But, he was taught by a German. At the time, the Germans we
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If you want the best pool of candidates to select from you need to make the pool as big as possible, not just a small number of universities where you have traditionally got good employees from. Also, from TFA:
But fresh data show that top schools are turning out black and Hispanic graduates with tech degrees at rates significantly higher than they are being hired by leading tech firms.
So even when ham-stringing themselves with a smaller pool of candidates they fail to select the best ones on merit alone.
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Non sequitur. The TFA/quote says nothing about "best ones" or "merit" in that context.
Assumption minorities are not top school graduates (Score:2)
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I don't see anyone shitting over nursing (Score:3, Funny)
Nursing is 99 percent female.
It is that way because females can't doctor.
There is no comparable field for coder.
Either you are male, or you don't code.
It is as God made us.
Embrace it.
Be a nurse, or K-12 teacher, or if you are tough chick, cop, jailer, or the if you are pretty, prostitute.
Re: I don't see anyone shitting over nursing (Score:2)
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It is that way because females can't doctor.
Well this is slashdot moderation reaching a new low.
It seems like the people with mod points are so obsessed with the fear of "SJW" whatever the hell they are they they've lost the ability to read or reason.
Either you are male, or you don't code.
It is as God made us.
Seriously guys? +2 insightful? How about -1 blatant troll?
Serious lack of white midgets in NBA! (Score:2, Insightful)
They've got a serious diversity issue.
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Yep. Also, no NBA players with disabilities!
eDiversity (Score:5, Funny)
About Us:
eDiversity was founded in 2015 by Ayotunde Okonjo, a self-taught Pakistani refugee of African descent. Spending her teenage years in Ecuador facing discrimination as a lesbian of colour, Ayotunde overcame the challenges of her muscular dystrophy and moved to Silicon Valley where she met Kiri Chey, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide and Heba Mohammad, a Yemen-born teacher of the Chemehuevi Uto-Aztecan language, and together their shared interest of underground Soviet-era outsider art and Haitian folk dancing brought them together to form eDiversity.
At eDiversity, we utilize crowdsourced design and 3d printing to provide innovative solutions to underprivileged children as a solution to the global energy crisis. In addition to our LEED platinum-certified central office, we operate five international branches in Kiribati, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the South Sandwich Islands, the latter of which also qualifies as an internationally recognized penguin reserve.
We seek $5,5m in seed funding for 2.5% of the company.
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Re: eDiversity (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Having previously worked in that industry, you could also say that gov't contracting provides a picture of what a tech company would look like if you kicked out all the H-1Bs. Having a general "US Citizen" requirement on an industry commonly populated by anything but, tends to shift things a lot.
Another thing that industry shows, is what things would look like if you removed the "specific known-to-the-west-cost top schools" bias that seems to be commonplace.
Sure, the average level of ability is far lower t
This is a direct consequence of Afirmative Action (Score:4, Insightful)
If you set up a system where you can be sued for firing people if they belong to a certain group why be surprised when they are not hired in the first place? Let's say women from a particular college were likely to accuse you of rape if you broke up. How many dates would they get?
The same thing here. You need to be 100% sure you are picking the perfect protected employee because it will cost you plenty to fire them. Nobody is going to give someone a chance to prove themselves because it's too risky.
Get rid of these stupid laws and you could easily hire 100 kids out of less well known schools and keep the 5 or 10 best.
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So many begged questions in that summary.. (Score:5, Interesting)
What's even funnier it's that the dolts pitching this agenda have no idea how little actual impact they're having; I founded my company with my wife listed as primary, so it's a "woman-owned business". I know not one but TWO business (one of them sizable) in which the founders were a couple of white guys and a black friend - the white guys put up the money and actually run the business, the black guy lets them use his identity as principal to make it a "minority" business.
My guess is that a significant portion of the "progress" made toward this utopian diversity goal is bullshit, and many if not most of these businesses are really funded and/or run by white men.
Federal fraud (Score:2)
That's explicitly illegal and considered a major fraud ( depending on the contract ).
A minority business by law has to be majority owned and managed by the minority group it claims be.
You, your wife and the rest of your associates can all do time for this.
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I like and agree with your posts, thanks for carrying water on this one.
What's the point of this? (Score:2)
It sure seems like it's a not entirely nuanced attempt to claim that Silicon Valley is struggling to suppress its desire to be willfully racist, conspiring with venture capitalists to ensure that black entrepeneurs are deliberately kept ot of Silicon Vallley and relying on discriminatory, elite colleges to make sure their "pipelines" are kept full of priviledged white people. Really?
I also can't help but ponder the contradiction in the institutional bias narratives. On one hand, institutional bias has kep
the "disparate impact racket" (Score:2)
I suggest reading someone who actually knows about this stuff, Thomas Sowell, on The Disparate Impact Racket [nationalreview.com].
To explain the Silicon Valley statistics with white racism, you'd have to conclude that white hiring committees discriminate against both African Americans and other whites in favor of Asians, a ridiculous proposition.
Quiz to check your implicit bias (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the big problems with discrimination is that many people have an implicit (unconscious) bias but little explicit (conscious) bias. This results in everyone saying they are color-blind, but acting differently. I challenge the Slashdot readers to gauge their own implicit bias by taking the implicit bias test at http://www.lookdifferent.org/w... [lookdifferent.org] . I found my own results to be surprising, and I suspect that yours may be surprising as well.
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This test has two main parts. First it asks you to sort between "white people and positive words" vs "black people and negative words". Then you sort between "white people and negative words" and "black people and positive words". Since you probably do the first task faster, it says you are the biased towards seeing white people as positive and black people as negative.
The problem is that just doing the test affects your judgment. When you do the first half, it trains you to build up an association between
What we are wresting with is... (Score:3)
idiots that suggest there is a "diversity problem" in the first place. All this does is exclude better qualified candidates by lowering the entry standards by requiring a certain percentage of this or that group.
Here is a radical notion....if you want a job go out and fucking earn it. Go to school and get a degree so you can show potential employers that you have the skills necessary to perform the work. Get someone to proof read you resume so that it isn't full of spelling and grammatical errors. Show up at an interview dressed professionally. Ease up on the neck tattoos and body piercings. Show the interviewed that you want the job not that you are entitled to it.
Realize that in Corporate America if you want to get ahead you have to fit in. Fitting in has nothing to do with skin color or gender. It has everything to do with looking and acting like the bosses do. If that's not your thing then work for a small company. If that's not your thing either then work as a contractor or start your own business.
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such a complete load of bullshit (Score:3)
You know why most basketball players are black? Is it racist hiring practices? No! The best players are black and they hire the best players. The source of the issue is that it became part of black culture to aspire to be a great basketball player so there's a higher volume of black people trying to get good at it which results in a larger pool to choose from with better players at the very top end. The same goes for programming. Go to an inner city school and ask any black person if doing well in school and aspiring to get a great eduction is considered "acting white" and would be frowned upon by the person's peers. The answer is yes and, it's mostly BET's fault, and it's why Facebook isn't filled with black programmers.
What about other professions??? (Score:3)
People must take personal responsibility (Score:4, Insightful)
This diversity junk is a disease. Its a mental disorder. People must take personal responsibility if they want something and they refuse to do so they have no one to blame but themselves. To say we should punish people who did work to reward people who refuse to take initiative and make the equal effort is insane and it punishes those who honestly worked for what they have. There is nothing, nothing at all that prevents people of any race, or gender, from going into IT job fields. As long as they are citizens of the country, I am all for anyone who wants to doing this. The fact is, they should have the same access to educational opportunities as everyone else. If you give anyone preferential treatment, you are creating a system of discrimination that provides a benefit to one group and not another. In fact, that seems to be what they are doing. The Bottom line, is if this group or that group is not taking advantage of the educational opportunities that is available to everyone equally, then thats their own fault and their own problem. If we are going to give these people MORE opportunities than other groups what you are doing is creating a new form of discrimination. Basically, the rule should be everyone should have access to the same educational, prepatory, and employment opportunities, regardless of their race. If people of a certain race refuse to make use of these opportunities, thats their own problem, they have to take responsibility for themselves and their actions and no one else is to blame if they refuse to do so. If we start shovelling more money at people who through their own choice refuse to take advantage of the same opportunities available to everyone else, you are punishing everyone else who WORKED and made the effort to achieve, you are punishing people for no fault of their own, people who honestly worked to achieve what they have, not having a benefit that was not available to anyone else, essentially what we are doing is rewarding mediocrity and sloth. This diversity for the sake of diversity and punish people who actually work for their achievement to reward those who refuse to take initiative has got to stop
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Type 1: If you try to hire the best candidates, it means you're not maintaing your diversity/sex percentages, so you're racist/sexist.
Type 2: If you try to maintain diversity/sex percentages, it means you won't hire some people because of their race/sex, so you're racist/sexist.
Both types are stupid and racist, but at least with the first one you're hiring the best candidates!
Re: Nothing will ever be enough (Score:2)