Intel Report Shows Tech Companies Still Struggle With Diversity (axios.com) 354
Intel became the latest tech company to report diversity statistics Tuesday, sharing a mixed bag of annual numbers that included small gains in some areas, relatively flat numbers of Black employees and a decline in female representation in the U.S. Axios reports: Women made up a bit more than a quarter of Intel's employee headcount, seeing a tiny drop in the U.S. compared to last year and a similarly minuscule increase over the same period for Intel's total global workforce. The percentage of underrepresented minorities in the U.S. workforce ticked up by a fraction of a percentage point, coming in at just over 16%. African American representation was flat at 4.9%.
"It may be slower than we would like but at least the conversation is on the table," Intel's interim chief diversity and inclusion officer Dawn Jones told Axios. Intel's inability to significantly boost the diversity of its workforce is far from unique in the industry. Intel wants to set up an industry-wide effort that would work to help standardize ways of measuring different diversity statistics from one company to another.
"It may be slower than we would like but at least the conversation is on the table," Intel's interim chief diversity and inclusion officer Dawn Jones told Axios. Intel's inability to significantly boost the diversity of its workforce is far from unique in the industry. Intel wants to set up an industry-wide effort that would work to help standardize ways of measuring different diversity statistics from one company to another.
Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine that your doctor graduated based on "diversity" and not merit. Is that really who you want treating you?
Now apply this to hardware -- is that really who you want working on designing the next CPU? Someone who got in based on the color their skin and not based on their skill?
What is this nonsense -- The Verge ?
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like some horses are fantastic racers, and some can draw a carriage, some can prance sideways, etc... some cultures have focused on, and selected individuals based on criteria that others haven't. No big deal. The free market will guide each person to their natural path. You don't find "gender and diversity" issues in the NFL, the Army, or the fishing industry. Why should we look at chip designers differently? They are predominantly male because... well men have thinking styles and traits that are probably better suited to that kind of work. Nothing wrong with that. Honestly this bullshit is exhausting. I don't want to read about it anymore, its not important! Show me a sexist woman-abusing pig in one of those companies, and then we can have a discussion about what's wrong with the world!
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Be warned, you've treaded into the territory James Damore was accused of going into, yet at worst he wrote about different interests between the sexes, not necessarily their aptitude at this or that on the whole.
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Saying one race is better suited for one task than the other is biologically incorrect and, because it has no foundation in science and tries to explain away sociological differences with pseudo-science also commonly known as racism. I am shocked that such a blatantly racist comment would garner points on Slashdot. Different skin colors do not lead to different races. And humans aren't millions of years old.
>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherpa_people
"A 2010 study identified more than 30 genetic factors that make Tibetans' bodies well-suited for high altitudes, including EPAS1, referred to as the "super-athlete gene" that regulates the body's production of hemoglobin,[8] allowing for greater efficiency in the use of oxygen.[9][10]"
I guess this is pseudo science also then....
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
At this point, I have to ask, if this comment is serious or satire. This comparison of humans to horse races.
At this point, I have to ask why you hate science so much. Evolutionary development is a well established fact. Whether it is horses bred for racing under the auspices of the selections of a husbandman, or humans bred under the auspices of social selection, how does the selection not exist or not have an effect upon the resulting population?
Or, are you claiming that evolution doesn't exist?
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is NuSlashdot: News For SJWs. Stuff And Nonsense.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Notice the posting, as usual, BeauHD, politics before science and technology.
He really needs to head off to Polygon / Verge etc
Re: (Score:2)
at the end of the day you get more money and a better title so you do not refuse it
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Do we need to haave this conversation EVERY time?
I don't think any one is talking about hiring someone for the color of their skin or their gender identity. Measuring the problem and recognizing there is a problem is the first step toward solving the problem. Some thoughts:
it is important for an organization to have a workforce that somewhat represent the demographics of its customer and of the country where it is set. If there are issues that affect women primarily, it is more likely that women would care
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Measuring the problem and recognizing there is a problem is the first step toward solving the problem.
What problem?
it is important for an organization to have a workforce that somewhat represent the demographics of its customer and of the country where it is set.
Why? Are such organizations more profitable? Are they more long lived? Is the quality of their products measurably better?
If there are issues that affect women primarily, it is more likely that women would care and attempt to solve these issues. As such, if you have no women (or not enough women) in your ranks, then the organization may fail to recognize problems, solutions, and opportunities.
You say the organization "may" fail...is there any data suggesting failure actually happens? Shouldn't we be able to look at similar companies in similar markets and see a measurable difference if one company's workforce is more or less "diverse"?
It is also important to recognize that your interview process is not 100 accurate. During the interview process you try to estimate who is going to be a good fit for the position. But you never actually pick the best person for the position because there is a discrepancy between perception of "quality" and the actual "quality" of the employee. In my experience, the difference is large and not small. So if you get to the point where you have two candidates that seem to be close in perceived quality, you may want to prefer the one from an underrepresented group at your institution. The problem of hiring a diverse workforce is also linked to your applicant pool. It turns out that if you seek explicitly applications from a particular demographic, then you do find qualified prospect in that group. What happens often is that they have a somewhat different profiles than the rest of the company and because of that, they get culled early in the process. A typical example may be that recruiters may not be as familiar with HBCU or women's college. They train their students damn well. But because most applicants are from top ivy league schools, the HBCU's and women's college applicants get passed on. A fundamental problem is simply that there aren't that many african american (for instance) who graduate with a CS degree nation wide. So your statistics at big companies are going to reflect that. Intel does have efforts to try to improve education in general. But changes is slow. In my university, students that are african american (once again for instance) tend to come to lower resource zip codes. Which means they come from under resources high schools, with no AP math classes, poor math skills, usually no CS class in high school, and definitely no AP CS opportunities. That is a hard problem to tackle in the US because school funding has been linked to property taxes which mean richer districts gets more funds than poorer ones. Since public education is extremely evil communist satanic completely unreasonable expense and opposed to American Ideals(TM), the poor school districts don't get 5% of the resources they would need to fix this problem.
Blah blah blah. Give me a valid BUSINESS reason why I shouldn't advertise a position as widely as possible, then select the b
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Why is this a problem? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
So if you get to the point where you have two candidates that seem to be close in perceived quality, you may want to prefer the one from an underrepresented group at your institution.
And hiring based on race is racist. There is no such thing as "reverse racism", there is only racism.
I'll see this all the time where employers will claim to be "equal opportunity employer" and "affirmative action employer", but this is impossible as the two are mutually exclusive. Either you hire without regard to race or you prefer those from one race over that of another.
And then there is this...
As such, if you have no women (or not enough women) in your ranks, then the organization may fail to recognize problems, solutions, and opportunities.
What utter bullshit. If you cannot give a specific example on how a woman might be better with a piece of code or portion of logic over that of a man then this is just diversity virtue signalling. If you want good engineering then hire good engineers.
That is a hard problem to tackle in the US because school funding has been linked to property taxes which mean richer districts gets more funds than poorer ones.
So, you are equating race with social status? How racist of you. Not every Christian heterosexual white male was brought up by an upper middle class family with two parents in an above average school district.
If people want to see an end to racism and sexism then here's an idea, leave race and sex out of your hiring decisions.
Re: (Score:2)
Can you at least agree though that if an employer really was equal opportunity then the make-up of their workforce would reflect the make-up of society?
Re: Why is this a problem? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It depends why you think different groups of people have an affinity for a particular task. For example men are massively under-represented in primary teaching (under 12s) and in nursing. I think the reasons for that are bad and should be addressed because they hurt men and are not some kind of biological imperative or anything like that, but you may disagree.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh hell no. Different cultures have unique value systems, which means certain jobs are admired and sought after, while others are looked down upon and avoided, and it varies from culture to culture, race to race, locality to locality. Gender based preferences for certain behaviours manifest in humans before they even learn to speak, and every study agrees that the more free people are to choose what they want to do in life, the larger this preference gap between the sexes becomes.
On the contrary, if a com
Re: (Score:2)
So what you are saying is that no employer is really equal opportunity because the candidate pool is already biased by cultural and gender biases. I agree.
But do you not agree that it's valid to try to address those biases? Or is it up to someone other than the employer, or do we just do nothing? Or are they not an issue at all to you?
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we need to haave this conversation EVERY time?
No we should all just agree with you.
Just because you can measure something doesn't make it a problem. What is necessarily wrong with not having equal distribution of people in the work force. Sure women will probably have a different point of view, and priorities but have somewhere close to 50% is not some magical number at which this occurs.
The problem here is women in general don't want to work in IT, this is demonstrated by other high end professions such as lawyers, and doctors where they catching up or even surpassing men. Women are quite capable doing all these jobs and nothing is stopping them, they simply don't seem to want to do them. In countries with greater choice they still don't go into IT. Why should society dictate what people should do with their lives just to get the number to be equal.
Perhaps we should start imprisoning more women and white people just get the numbers even. Or maybe there is a disproportionate number of gay people in the entertainment industry perhaps we should even that out.
While I agree that these stats may indicate a problem, they definitely don't mean there is one. All it means is we should look further and find the root cause, and maybe those cause are acceptable, like women just don't enjoy that type of work as much. Not try to massage the numbers so we all look like good little people. But that is hard, its easier just to appear equal, form over substance.
Re: (Score:2)
All it means is we should look further and find the root cause
I wish people would do that more often.
Education problem. Not HR problem. (Score:2)
All it means is we should look further and find the root cause
We know the root cause. It is an educational disparity problem.
This is not something that new HR guidelines can fix in two years. This is something that will require educational reform and a decade or more to fix.
Re: Why is this a problem? (Score:2)
Women are not interested in IT fields except by small percentages. There is nothing stopping men from becoming nurses, and yet their population among nurses makes 25% seem astronomically large. Women by majority, are turned off by tech. Try getting laid sometime by going to a bar and sounding excited by the new breakthroughs in NVME storage. I am not saying it is impossible, but damn your odds are not good.
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Similarly, when Trump announced [pbs.org], he is replacing Ginsburg with a woman, he did the same thing.
The situations are slightly different. When Trump announced that RBG's replacement would be a woman, ACB was already at the top of the short-list. He announced his pick within days.
When Biden said his VP would be "a woman" (NOT originally a WOC), the political rumor-mill said that it would be Amy Klobuchar. That made sense because she would pull the ticket back to the center after Biden's chain had been jerked to the left during the primaries. She would also help him in the Upper Midwest, which was a critical battleground.
Unfortunately, Klobuchar imploded. She did poorly in the primaries. Stories came out about prosecutorial misconduct. Her husband turned out to be a male Karen.
Then, after George Floyd was killed, Biden came under intense pressure to not only pick a woman but a woman-of-color. The pickings were slim. Kamala Harris was the least bad choice. She pulled the ticket to the left rather than the center. As a coastal elite from deep-blue California, she had nothing to add. She may have helped Joe a bit with minorities, but they were mostly going to vote for him anyway.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
The pickings were slim. Kamala Harris was the least bad choice.
I don't know about that, but she's going to be president before the term is over.
Re: (Score:2)
"The least bad choice." That's a very subjective kind of metric, and results will differ wildly based on the a person's values and location on the political compass.
It also describes USA politics perfectly. The USA is a kakistocracy where every candidate is one form of horrible or another, and people can only choose what kind of devil rules them.
Re: (Score:2)
coastal elite
I remember when people kept telling me that as a leftist SJW I believed in a hierarchy of victims and other such nonsense. A couple of years later and those same people have fully adopted the concept themselves, labelling everyone they don't like as an "elite" and claiming to represent the common person.
It's actually a bit of a tell. Just look at what they are accusing you of today and you know what they will be doing tomorrow.
Re: (Score:3)
that's exactly, what is being talked about.
You're conflating two issues.
1. Underrepresentation of various groups in a company.
2. what to do to change 1.
Underrepresentation is a problem:
- a monoculture tends to look at problems from only their perspective. A more diverse team has a better chance of avoiding this. We've seen some high-profile instances of this, in e.g. facial recognition systems that perform much worse on black people. If the team building this system had had a few black members, they'd have found this in private testing, instead of a
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Any one who tries to increase representation of a racial minority in an industry is guilty of racism. What if, culturally, black people just don't want to be programmers or astrophysicists in any great degree, and their culture does not value this kind of work? Who are we to tell them how to be? Telling someone how to be black sounds very.. well.. racist?
The same goes for gender. Telling women that they need to value engineering far more than they want to sounds a lot like that horrible word "mansplai
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Any one who tries to increase representation of a racial minority in an industry is guilty of racism.
No, that's incorrect. You're attempting to poison all attempts to change the situation by painting them with a "racism" brush. As I already indicated, there are cases where qualified candidates are turned down because of their skin color or gender. That's racism. Making people aware of their biases isn't racist.
Blindly filling a quotum can be racist, removing bias is not.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it is racism. It is racism, even when that skin color is white — as happened in Biden/Harris case, to repeat the more famous recent example.
Denouncing racism is fine. "Fighting it" with more racism is not...
Which blind filling is exactly, what TFA is about — when a skewed racial/sexual representation is accepted as evid
Re: (Score:2)
When Biden's handlers announced, his running mate will be a "woman of color" â" they signaled exactly that.
Maybe Biden realized that race is a big issue at the moment and that there hasn't been a female VP ever, so there might be advantages to selecting one. Maybe the numbers suggested that voters would like to see a black and/or female VP, which wouldn't be surprising because voters like representation.
In any case you are begging the question by assuming that there is an objectively "best" candidate that can be selected purely on some clear, hard definition of merit. In politics it's rarely the most qualified o
Re: (Score:2)
Personally, I'm convinced the "woman VP" thing was simply an excuse not to pick Bernie, and perhaps the "woman of color VP" thing had the desired impact of excluding Elizabeth Warren as well.
I'm not expressing an opinion whether this was good or bad, but I think this was Biden's political calculation.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair the qualifications required for being someone's running mate are just to help the person win the election. So gender/race definitely can be defined in order to appeal to a desired demographic.
And a SCOTUS judge is rarely selected based on merit.
So, while your point is correct, you should have used different examples.
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you fill a page with words and don't mention IQ even once -
There is an even bigger issue: personal preference.
You could argue that women have slightly lower maths ability on average, and lower variance, so that men are over-represented in both the highest and lowest percentiles of aptitude. But when you do the numbers, this does not come close to explaining why so few women are in engineering. One answer is that they have different interests, different preferences (on average).
But there is another: If we do accept maths aptitude differences, we might expect something like 30% of those top technical minds to be female. But in other fields of ability, those selected women are going to score more highly on average than the men. You are comparing, say, the top 1% of women to the top 2% of men. That minority will make better doctors, better lawyers, better scientists or managers, on average, than their male engineering counterparts. Engineering is competing with other fields for the top people.
So the proportion of women in engineering will be *even lower* than a simple population aptitude would predict. The 30% becomes 20%, or 10% by such competition that values verbal skill more highly. And that is even before you take personal preference into account.
I'm not American, so I will not pretend to understand your race issues, but I'd hazard a guess that while IQ differences are greater than for gender, differing personal choices still matter more than differences in ability, even at the extremes of IQ that we are talking about here. And there is nothing to be gained by big corporations fighting that with "diversity policies" and quotas.
How about just accepting that real diversity and freedom means we make different choices?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If you fill a page with words and don't mention IQ even once - you fail.
Oh gosh you're one of those "high IQ" types who thinks IQ is worth anything other than bragging rights aren't you?
Why would anyone mention IQ in a post about hiring, since IQ has very little relevance to hiring.
Re: Why is this a problem? (Score:2)
The interesting thing about IQ is that its a sliding scale. Its a score ranked based on the average test takers. If you forced every downs syndrome and severely autistic child (not asbergers but severe) to take an IQ test, suddenly everyone elses score would increase. Likewise if the only people taking IQ tests are people who seem very bright, you score might be lower than you expected.
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Black doctors get a bonus to their scores, asian ones get a penalty.
This is racism. End of fucking story. No amount of whippings, lynchings, jim crow laws, projects, ghettos, or other raw deals handed to black people justifies this, especially with how Japanese-Americans were treated during WW2.
Re: (Score:2)
Is this actually true? Do you have a citation?
I've seen cases where some people from disadvantages backgrounds get help to access university courses, but ultimately they have to pass the same exams (marked anonymously) as everyone else.
Re: (Score:2)
Adversity scores are what I'm talking about, they were held to a lower standard and given chances that someone of a different race would be denied despite having the same or better scores on SATs and similar. If people can pass with lower standards to enter, then your standards are inflated.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine that your doctor graduated based on "diversity" and not merit. Is that really who you want treating you?
You think that's a joke. Students in NZ gain entry to medical school with vastly different exam results, based on attributes such as race, refugee status, rural schooling, "lower socio-economic" categories, etc.
If you're white or asian from a major city you would have to average 95% on entrance examinations. If you're maori or pasifika you might get in with a 70% average on the same exams.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Why is this a problem? (Score:2)
I dont have the exact numbers but women decimate men in the nursing positions. Why do we never hear about the fact that the nursing career is over 95% women?
It isnt that women WANT jobs in Tech fields and are being squeezed out. Its that maybe 25%, if your lucky, are tech minded in the first place. If you dont believe me, try talking techie talk when trying to hook up at a bar. Thats a quick lesson on how NOT to get laid. You might find someone, but the odds are higher if you stick to other topics. If talki
Re: Why is this a problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Why do we never hear about the fact that the nursing career is over 95% women?
We do:
Focus: Men in nursing – tipping the gender balance [nursingtimes.net]
Nursing: it’s time for more men to make a mark on the ward [theguardian.com]
Why men might be the answer to the staff shortfall [nursinginpractice.com]
ORIGINALLY (Score:2, Insightful)
The original reason why diversity was thought to be good, is that it brings new points of view to a mono-culture. Someone raised in the Sahara may have a very different mindset, which corresponds to some unique tools for problem solving. This helps the group.
That doesn't happen anymore, because with strict leftist ideology dominating, everyone now is supposed to think the exact same way (or get cancelled). Even though everyone may look different from each other, the benefits of diversity of thought are l
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Erm, sorry to fuck up your shit argument with a fact, but women medical students outnumber men. By 2-1 in some schools.
Those schools should be turning away people with vaginas.
DO THEY ?
Re: Why is this a problem? (Score:2)
In the US you would be playing Wheres Waldo trying to find a male nurse. They exist, but bald eagles are easier to find.
"at least the conversation is on the table" (Score:3)
Are you fucking kidding me?
Go to any tech firm of consequence and take a good look. You see a plethora of white and Indian men and a very small number of "everyone else".
There isn't even the pretense of trying to hide it.
Tired of the status quo? Incent your employees to bring in folks that the recruiters can't seem to find. Call me crazy, but I seem to recall there being PLENTY of women and other diverse folks in my engineering school. Just sayin....those folks didn't just vanish from the workforce.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I came to say about the same. Look at the applicants. You can't hire people that don't apply.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that a noisy minority has been able to convince just about every normal American that if a certain race or gender isn't applying enough, it's because of racism or sexism. Unless it's white men who are under-represented, then they are doing it to themselves.
This laughably childish concept of what's going on in the work place is the actual mentality of your average American, including top CEO's and politicians. I'm sure some don't honestly believe this tripe, but because we've built ourselves
Re:"at least the conversation is on the table" (Score:5, Informative)
I am not sure about more recent years, but when I entered college in the fall of 1995, there were seven women in the CS program and roughly 100 men. One of the women switched majors to English after one semester. I'm not sure how many others graduated with CS degrees.
Most of the engineering programs (electrical and computer engineering excluded) had a higher proportion of women. But chemical, mechanical, and civil engineers don't show up in the kind of firms that are covered on Slashdot. They got hired instead by companies like ExxonMobil, Air Products, auto manufacturers (or their OEMs), and so forth.
Re:"at least the conversation is on the table" (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand the push to hire women, it seems like the wrong place to emphasize things. If the pool of available female candidates is size X, then the industry will never be able to hire more than X candidates who can do the job.
If you want more women in software, you need to convince them to pursue that career path in the first place, either through college, coder bootcamps, or self-teaching. Logically there's not a lot else that will change the ratio of men to women.
Re: (Score:2)
Hiring is part of the problem -- a good manager should reach out to as many qualified candidates as possible. My opinion is that it is, however, a relatively small part of the problem. More of the problem has to do with other workplace dynamics: Usually things that are not explicitly or intentionally sexist or racist, but which still filter workers so that fewer women or minorities stick around. Those are a lot harder to address than initial hiring.
(Explicit or intentionally sexist or racist dynamics are
Re: (Score:2)
We admitted that long hours were common,
ok that's a human problem, your company was sick.
Re: (Score:2)
You have no idea what that company was like. It was far more healthy when people were working long hours than after it got bought by a large multinational.
At the latter point, long hours were extremely rare, but the upper management was different and too many of them were dysfunctional. For example, one of the dysfunctional managers decreed that no engineer was allowed to take vacation until product X shipped, even if they were a software person and the software was done, just waiting on mechanical or har
Re: (Score:2)
I've often felt that if the "big companies that get the news articles" did everything and anything possible to get to the desired gender ratio, regardless of how far they had to lower the bar and incentivize candidates, you know what would likely happen? The entire rest of the industry would likely wind up being 99.9% male.
We spend so much time beating up "big tech" over this, while completely ignoring "little tech." When the overall pool is this tiny, fixing one ends up hurting the other. Unfortunately, fi
Re:"at least the conversation is on the table" (Score:4, Insightful)
I had roughly the same experience in college, around the same time. Very few women in the EE/CS classes.
Frankly, the notion that there's some nationwide conspiracy to avoid hiring female programmers is ridiculous. I work on videogames, so the teams I'm on have lots of designers, writers, artists, animations, producers, etc, all with plenty of females in them. The only teams that tended to be hugely imbalanced towards males were the programming teams. And this happened at EVERY company.
There's really only one reasonable explanation for this, but too many people are wedded to some ridiculous conspiracy theory about how women are somehow being pushed out of the field. Or, they'll say that these companies are being unintentionally racist or sexist, which still really doesn't explain the companies I've worked at, who manage to hire plenty of diverse candidates in every department except one.
But of course, it's not very PC to suggest that men and women may be wired in fundamentally different ways. So giant corporations still pretend that they need to meet some artificial quota of hires, regardless of who is applying, as though the imbalance of applicants is somehow their fault.
Re: (Score:2)
When I went to college from 89 to 95 for pharmacy, my class was two thirds women. This ratio was reflected in the work environment as well. The women I worked with were well suited for the job and many of the excelled. Pharmacy is a great gig, paying over six figures.
How come we don't see anyone complaining about the lack of diversity in Pharmacy?
Maybe we should be forcing these smart and talented women to move over to computer science careers instead, just to make sure we don't have any obviously unfair im
Re: (Score:2)
PLENTY of women and other diverse folks in my engineering school. Just sayin....those folks didn't just vanish from the workforce.
They didn't leave the workforce, but many of them left engineering.
Why do women leave engineering? [mit.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
> Oh I dunno....a culture of hiring folks that look just like "us"?
Is that what the NBA does? I just assumed they hired based on talent.
Re: (Score:2)
And hiring based on talent really works for the NBA. Why is it we want companies like intel to do something else?
I don't think there's anything wrong with businesses devoting resources to find *qualified* female candidates or "candidates of color". But hanging your head and saying "we're failing because our workforce doesn't match the societal ideal" is just dumb.
Re: (Score:2)
NBA, NFL, a good chunk of the music industry.
I'm not calling for... a culture of hiring folks that look just like "us", anywhere... but if we are going to go down that road... why don't we have more short chubby men in the NBA for the purposes of representation?
Where are the White people? (Score:2)
At the linked report, the photo at the top right only has 1 White guy. This is not diversity and inclusion. If you don't like what I said, then why does Intel even bother making such reports?
Intel work hours / environment (Score:3)
Does anybody know what it's like working for Intel, what kinds of hours most people out in, whether it's high-stress?
I've noticed that the most easy-going organizations I've worked in, where people put in their 40 hours (or a little less) but didn't worry too much about it, had majority female employees, or close to it. Conversely, the 60-80 hours cut throat "crunch time all the time" places didn't seem to have a lot of women who wanted to put up with that bullshit^H^H^H^H^H^H environment.
That's just my personal experience, though, a small sample. Have others noticed the same thing, are more men stupid/hard-working enough to deal with that?
Seriously you could call it "stupid to put up with a company's bullshit" or you could call it "hard-working x or whatever you want to call it. I'm not making a value judgement here, just wondering if that's a trend others have seen.
* Yes of course I know women who put in crazy hours, like my mom did. After my dad died - he had also put in crazy hours. I'm asking if anyone has noticed an *overall* trend of women vs men *on* average.
Re: (Score:2)
Last I saw, Intel still used the "Focal" system of performance evaluation(Ranking and Rating). They distribute ratings among staff by percentage, with 10% getting the highest rating, and 10% getting the lowest.
Used to be, being in the bottom 10% meant you were at risk of layoff, though in recent years being above the "bottom 10% forced ranking" didn't mean you weren't laid off anyway.
Re:Intel work hours / environment (Score:4, Informative)
I was an employee for 11 years for Intel, and no the generalization you crafted about female employees working more like 40 hours and guys working more like 60-80 hours is totally not true. At least at Intel, if you're asking.
Intel was a really good place to work. I enjoyed my time there. It is the same at any job. There work will never run out, so how much are you willing to give. This is how some saw it, like me. I put in 40 hours most weeks, and as is the case every month or so you would need to put in a few longer days to make sure a project stayed on target. Nothing I would consider being oppressive. Just part of working for a large tech company and we were all paid well for it.
Next in line: This diversity thing I believe is what is killing Intel right now. They have been so focused on it for a number of years now they don't hire the best. It takes a long time for a large company to lose so much ground, but look at it today. They are now behind and I don't think they will ever recover.
People, why is diversity important? It's not diversity of skin color/sex/etc. It's diversity of though. How did you get diversity of thought? Usually when you hired a black person from South Africa. When you hired a young Indian woman from India. When you hired a white guy from a affluent neighborhood. Bring them together and they can share their backgrounds. Each learn from each other.
What is not diversity. Hiring the same black person, Indian woman, and white guy who had the same upbringing in the neighborhood, etc. It's not the skin that makes us so different. It's how we think and the perspectives we have that's important.
If we hire by skin color, or sex or whatever, are we not just as racist, sexist, etc as ever before? How can we use these metrics for hiring and not look ourselves in the mirror and say: I just hired someone because they are "you fill in the blank"
Re: (Score:2)
Discrimination is a social ill, but why would diversity - of thought or otherwise - be automatically good for ANY business and line of work? When you have to be very creative and challenge status quo - sure. But in other cases employees need to execute without trying to each be a boss and avoid conflict in stressful situations. Why won't homogeneity be better in some of these cases?
Manufacturing vs invention (Score:2)
> When you have to be very creative and challenge status quo - sure. But in other cases employees need to execute without trying to each be a boss and avoid conflict in stressful situations. Why won't homogeneity be better in some of these cases?
I've been told by people from multiple other countries that American culture is very much more "think outside the box" and "do it your own way", whereas most other countries emphasize more following procedure, doing your little part for the overall organization,
Thanks for info. Not quite what I meant (Score:2)
> Intel was a really good place to work. I enjoyed my time there. It is the same at any job. There work will never run out, so how much are you willing to give. This is how some saw it, like me. I put in 40 hours most weeks, and as is the case every month or so you would need to put in a few longer days to make sure a project stayed on target.
Thanks for the info!
> female employees working more like 40 hours and guys working more like 60-80 hours is totally not true. At least at Intel, if you're asking
Re: (Score:2)
People, why is diversity important? It's not diversity of skin color/sex/etc. It's diversity of though. How did you get diversity of thought? Usually when you hired a black person from South Africa. When you hired a young Indian woman from India. When you hired a white guy from a affluent neighborhood. Bring them together and they can share their backgrounds. Each learn from each other.
One big problem I have with all these "diversity statistics" reports is that they lump everyone by broad racial categories, and completely ignore ethic factors.
The category labeled "white people" in tech is frequently composed of a very diverse pool of immigrants from all over Europe, the Middle East, and other parts of the world.
Likewise, the category labeled "Asian people" in tech is also composed of a very diverse pool from East and South Asia.
Yet, the way these stats are compiled, the total of both migh
Re: (Score:2)
For a lot of years, Intel had a system where they would have another team working on the same project as you, except they wouldn't tell you about it. Then whichever team completed the project successfully was chosen and the work of the other team was discarded. That seemed to work well for developing manufacturing processes, not so well for chip architecture, and it couldn't have been good for morale.
Intel has also been one of the pioneers of outsourcing to cheaper countries (emphasis on cheap), sometimes
Re: (Score:2)
For a lot of years, Intel had a system where they would have another team working on the same project as you, except they wouldn't tell you about it. Then whichever team completed the project successfully was chosen and the work of the other team was discarded. That seemed to work well for developing manufacturing processes, not so well for chip architecture, and it couldn't have been good for morale...
A "Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves" Thunderdome mentality towards personnel measurement and retention? Other than on an actual battlefield, we don't even find that stupid shit going on in our Military. Yeah, I can't imagine that being anything less than fucked for morale. Talk about cutthroat competition.
Intel has also been one of the pioneers of outsourcing to cheaper countries (emphasis on cheap), sometimes with good results, sometimes not.
For a company hell-bent on spending twice as much on resources assigning multiple teams to the same project in order to flush out the "unacceptables", they sure as hell don't seem cheap.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think that's a fair analysis.
I worked in pharmacy for 30 years. Our hours are insane (70 hour weeks for some shifts) and the high volume work loads are incredibly stressful (imagine a single mistake being enough to kill someone). The nearly two third ratio of women to men in the field seem quite capable of working long and hard hours. I'd even say that some of them were better suited to it then I was.
\_()_/
Hire in Africa or South America (Score:2)
If Intel wants to be more diverse, it'll have to hire in Africa or South America.
Let's face it, all the smart people in the US are already working hard for someone else.
No need for them to hire in Asia, they already have enough of those.
Useless Tokenism (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Who do you think you are, James Damore?
The essay that got him into so much trouble was basically an elaboration on your thesis: He argued that there are two ways to improve diversity, and Google's usual ratio-driven approach is the ultimately futile way to do that. Rather than trying to force the output ratios by forcing a certain input ratio, it is better to understand what incentives and environmental factors skew the input ratio so badly in the first place, and to address those structural issues rather
Intel vs. USA Demographics (Score:5, Informative)
Intel Technical Staffing
---
at Intel*, in the USA**
White: [43.9%, 76.3%] -- UNDER -42%
Asian: [39.7%, 5.9%] -- VASTLY OVER (672%)
Latino/a: [10.3%, 18.5%] -- UNDER -44%
Black: [4.9%, 13.4%] -- VASTLY UNDER -63%
Native American: [0.8%, 1.3%] -- UNDER -38%
Pacific Islander: [0.3%, 0.2%] -- OVER (150%)
Intel -- https://www.intel.com/content/... [intel.com]
USA census 2019 -- https://www.census.gov/quickfa... [census.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not saying that there isn't disparity. I'm just saying it's not exactly Intel just being bigoted with its hiring practices. They can only hire from the available pool of qu
Intel has the right approach (Score:3)
If the statistics aren't in your favor, form an industry consortium to agree on different statistics.
Diversity with Engineering graduates (Score:2)
How does this compare with the diversity of Engineering graduates?
If the bias is low, then the diversity composition should be close.
To force a different diversity composition than with graduating candidates, discrimination is required.
Re: (Score:2)
because universities also have quotas and affirmative action its still biased, so people tend to compare to population average.. but of course these comparisons are based on skin color and sex, not diversity of thought or anything like that, which is hard to measure.
Why does everyone want to force women (Score:3)
To do something they are not interested in? If there are objective ways in which they are treated worse than men with same talents, personality, family commitments, then by all way remedy these issues. In the school, nobody envied dateless geeks hunched over programmable calculators. Sure their jobs ended up paying nicely, but who is to say others would have enjoyed the tradeoffs. Let people live whoever they want rather than feeling they have to prove something for their tribe.
Diversity is a nice goal (Score:2)
I am sure there are real business advantages to diversity. However what can Intel, or rather any other company can do about this?
So you are looking for chip designers, or industrial engineers. If the "output" of the schools do not "fit"; then the "input" to the companies will not either. Of course they can try do do outreach programs, and tap into lost talent. However it will only go so far.
Shall they turn down otherwise capable candidates to make others look good?
What else can a single company do?
It's a horrible goal. (Score:2)
It's a horrible goal. What if people don't want to play your game? What if certain demographics just aren't interested in pursuing the education paths that will make them qualified to work for your company? What are you supposed to do, tell them they're WRONG for doing what they want in life?
I know! You can lie to them and tell them they're secretly OPPRESSED by racistosexist mind control at an early age, called social conditioning, which makes them that way, and that way is BAD.
Go ahead. Tell blacks t
Re: (Score:2)
The reality is that diversity in the workplace is utterly incompatible with the concept of a free nation with free citizens.
The powers that be that want greater control and power know this, which is why (except for a few wide eyed zealots) most woke things seem to be top-down affairs. In order to have more obedient workers and subjects, a few "bigots" need to get fired, and a few "nazzis" need to get punched. Then we'll have safety and diversity and we can end institutional racism. Or something.
More and
What's worse... (Score:2)
Companies also struggle with making quality products and serving their paying customers well, but that's somehow taken for granted and nobody cares about it anymore.
Letâ(TM)s just guilt women into it! (Score:2)
I mean, who cares what they want to do with their own careers? Their responsibility is to the tech field, so let them start stepping up. If youâ(TM)re a woman and not working in technology, youâ(TM)re part of the problem. Get a job on a help desk now!
While We Are At It... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, and this is going to sound crazy: how about people are employed and paid based on their experience and merits, or the time / risk they are prepared to commit to for that role, Where certain physical attributes are desirable for a role that people are employed because they meet or exceed that criteria. Call me nuts, perhaps the people in movies and TV shows represent the time/era/setting/location of the STORY.
Imagine a utopia like that - instead of the hellhole culture of victimhood, entitlement, and general lack of responsibility that seems to have manifested in recent times.
But then what would I know, I am the devil incarnate, a white middle-class cis male patriarchal oppressor of everyone.
Probably the most victimized group these days.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
a white middle-class cis male patriarchal oppressor of everyone.
probably the most victimized group these days.
I'm not sure about oppressed but we certainly seem to have more whiny and incredibly delicate snowflakes than any other demographic, brother.
Do these companies hire based on internal employee (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If a company hires based on current employee recommendations of course this happens, White people tend to know more white people. I think as men itâ(TM)s easy to say females do not enter this field, is this because they have no interest in it, or donâ(TM)t want to have to deal with the advances of every single co-worker or classmate.
Uh, the entire field is suddenly filled with nothing but CIS-male sexual predator assholes? Let's try and not make the assumptions worse than the problem. I highly doubt the reason that over 90% of nurses are women, is because men don't want to deal with the "advances of every single co-worker or classmate"...
The Crux (Score:2)
Diversity Goals.
Getting as many different people as possible, to all do the same thing.
Stupid.
Diversity? (Score:2)
The only important question: Are women and minorities underrepresented at Intel compared to the percentage of women and minorities in tech careers, or graduating with applicable degrees over the past ten years?
Because "diversity" IS discrimination! (Score:4, Insightful)
It literally is the choosing of somebody because of the color of their skin or sexy parts etc. Instead of their skills.
It's amazing how some people managed to package vile hate and discrimination in a wrapper of "if you don't do it, you are not being nice.... and we will HATE and discriminate against you too, because we are the nicest.".
And it's fascinating, how lowlife humans will *always*, when they see something they deem evil, completely copy it, merely flip the polarity, and often even escalate, ... and NEVER ever get that they do it in a way that makes them just as evil.
As long as we haven't fixed that basic trait in humanity... The concept that revenge would be acceptable... We're still truly a primitier species.
Some people already knew and taught this, thousands of years ago, mind you. As the origins of our religious texts prove. (I mean the Jesus stories.)
We Need Merit an Qualifications. (Score:2)
Enough with the virtue-signaling bullshit.
Re: (Score:3)
We find things they can do. They come in very handy when you need someone to carry the radiation and neutron sources around, for example.