Slashdot Mirror
Is There Still Racism in IT Hiring Practices?
noahz asks: "Today [now three days ago] in the United States marks Martin Luther King Day, remembering the birthday - and legacy - of the great civil rights leader. It's been over 40 years since his march on Washington, back when IT was still in its infancy and was exclusively a white, male field. But, how much progress has been made in the IT world? I recently had a recruiter tell me that I would have no problem finding a job in the current economy - not because I am enthusastic, well-educated and have good experience - but because I am caucasian - 'white'. This particular recruiter insisted that his years experience has led him to this conclusion - but I wonder: what the collective experience of the Slashdot readership has found?"
Racism is still prevalent. It is just a matter of degree as to how blatant.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
I'm only racist against the GNAA
GNAA FP
I think there is a bit or racism brought on by the off-shoring of IT jobs but overall I don't think it's as bad as it is in many other sectors with real earning potential. It's probably more xenophobic than anything.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Seem to me IT, thanks to virual offices and networking is probably the most race-blind industry in existance.
While over half our IT staff are caucasian, we have many non-whites as well.
I would have to say that there is a little, but it is only in the name of "equal opportunity" and against caucasians. I have lost four jobs in the past to less (only slightly though) qualified individuals because they were minorities and the company had to meet the EOE minimum requirements... I am sure there is some stigma too, but anymore I doubt it.
Erutangis ym si siht.
GNAA forever.
Cliff sux. And this article is 3 days late (MLK day was Monday - it's thursday
I was hired by a dot-com at a job fair even though I had no experience. My boss later told me, he hired me because I was asian and wore glasses. So I suppose there are definitely stereotypes or racism.
Heck, it sure seems the best way to do well in IT is to have brown-colored skin.
</sarcasm>
Seriously, whoever told the story submitter that was a dumbass. Most IT managers I know are too hassled with deadlines and schedules (or are short on staff) to worry about the color of skin of their next hire.
Go somewhere random
We have a shop full of indians(big tech firm), and my boss pulled me to the side just today and asked me to make sure that I hired a white or a black guy for the spot that just opened up.
I plan to do just that.
So, there's racism in 2006 for you. Blacks and whites together, fighting for our jobs. BTW, we're white.
This is still rife in quite a lot of IT places. It is well known that certain types of people may be more technically adept, and people hire on that basis.
Of course, it doesn't help when company's outsource call centers...
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Although this does not cover all non white races, business people like to be able to understand who they are talking to. Overwhelmingly upper management (e.g; people that cut the checks) are white.
Thus white people want to hear white people on the other end of the phone. Or more appropriately, native english speakers.
I am not racist but I know that I prefer to call a support line or a consultant that doesn't have to "try" to speak my language.
Many people will not own up to this but the reality is most people would like to hear a female on the end of the phone as well. Is that sexist? Maybe, but it is reality.
It seems a person's accent has a bigger impact. People with american (midwest, southern, whatever), Brittish, Irish, Kiwi or Aussie accent seem to have an easier time communicating with recruiters and interviewers than someone with a Chinese, Indian, or even Russian accent.
There is probably a lot more age discrimination in IT than race discrimination. Now for upper management there is a huge racial imbalance. A company might have a 50% minory staff, but often less than 10% minority management.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
that Cliff of all people would want to play the race card...
...that holding an MLK Day story for 3 days before posting it is just weird.
The editors should have saved it until April 1, so that the sense of cognitive dissonance I got from viewing it was well-deserved.
I recently got my first job in an IT office, and the one thing that really surprised me was the amount of women working there. Although men outnumbered women by a little less than 2:1, I hadn't expected to find that many women in the first place. And, when a female applicant arrived for an interview, it seemed that she was always given equal treatment as compared to a male applicant (dare I say, it may have even appeared that she was prefered, simply due to her sex).
http://nemilar.net - It's just a blog.
I dont think this is the right place to ask this question...
Right now i can picture hundreds of white geeky looking computer nerds reading this story.
In one of the most diverse campuses for IT people in the country, i can honestly say that i have yet to meet a black person that reads slashdot.
Let me ask one of these white guys surrounding me.
Funny.. I had a recruiter tell me just the opposite -- that I would have an easier time getting a particular job with a particular company if I was NOT white. So to answer your question - Yes, there is apparently still racism in IT hiring.
I haven't seen any racism in my company, even though I work in the Deep South. I think humans tend to have "culture bias" which could, in some people, influence hiring decisions. If somebody walks into a professional interview with "culture-heavy" attire and starts throwing around street slang, there's a chance that's going to hurt his job prospects. Fact of life.
You seem to extrapolate from this one recruiter that the whole of IT has some racial basis. I wouldn't buy it unless you've seen it yourself. Even then, it's the individuals with this attitude, not the industry.
Yes, but now it's only against white males. Heaven forbid you should wind up with an IT staff that's all white males; you'll be scalped as a racist pig, whether or not you are. Bullshit "affirmative action" means hire ANYBODY who isn't Caucasian and a male. It's fucking discrimination, by DEFINITION, but the do-gooders think it makes up for past discrimination. It was wrong THEN, why isn't it wrong NOW? Equality for ALL, DAMMIT!
It is actually a stated policy by many corporate executives to hire more minorities. This looks good to government regulators, racial interest groups (Jesse Jackson, et. al.), and shareholders.
Sure, some whites do use the race card just like some Blacks have historically done to try to blame their own problems on others, but the issue is real. It wouldn't be fair to reject all Black racism claims just as much as it would be to do it for Whites who experience the same types of racial bigotry.
When a story shows up on slashdot almost 4 days later than the day it was posted shows some disrespect. Especially when the first word in the article is "today".
Know any black programmers? I don't, and I've been working in the industry for 15 years now. Not a single one.
Your claim is that the Equal Opportunity Act requires employers to hire less qualified workers if they are minorities, and that this explains why you weren't hired.
These claims are false. Please check for yourself.
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The next wave in the defense against discrimination charges..."But look at all the illiterate out-of-country workers we employ!"
Perhaps I should stop mentioning I was at Woodstock I during my job interviews.
It's suprising that not one of those FOUR companies said "What the hell! We'll just hire some new people without firing him because he's such an asset to our company".
I think it depends where you are. Which block in the city. Which company. Almost half the people I work with are from India and Pakistan. Anyway, the well qualified people I know have little trouble getting jobs.
And it wasn't because I'm female, which is what would be most people's first guess, but because I am not Jewish and was white. At one company I worked for all the good programming jobs went to the Jews (honestly! And 80% of them were Russian), all the good EE jobs went to the Vietnamese, and the scut jobs - maintenance and gatekeeping and the like - went to the white Christians. I stayed for four years because I was making so much money I was willing to put up with it, but in the end our entire division was closed.
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
I have worked for IT companies that had were over 99% white staffed in a predominetly black neighborhood. I have worked for IT companies where I was one of only white people there in a predominetly white neighborhood. I have yet to work in one with an equal mix. From my viewpoint it's always been the numbers game. In the first job I mentioned there were more white people getting promoted then black people. In the second, the exact opposite. I didn't view it as racism nor did I feel anyone was being racist in a benificial or otherwise manner at either job. I have also had people at both companies complain that "Man, how come no people are getting promoted?" Well duh, if 99% of your employees are of one color, what do you think is gonna happen around promotion time? Like I said, nothing to do with racism, it's just been the numbers game. Now, I have not worked in a place with equal mixes of races but I think most people just use "racism" as an excuse for why they didn't get promoted this time around.
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
I work in a small IT company in Australia. The owner and all of the people running it are white but more than 50% of the employees are not (including me). I suppose my boss believes that he should get the best person for the job.
However I have seen that in many cases, if there are 2 people (one white and an Asian for instance) with the exact same skillset and experience applying for a job, then the white man will most probably get the position. There isn't much racism when the non-caucasian has obviously better skills. This is just from my experience that's why I suppose us "minorities" are somewhat forced to work harder, get more qualifications, get better grades than the white masses. We can't compete with them on the same level so we have to do more.
I recently interviewed for an Oracle DBA job where the hiring manager told me we was really hoping to find an Indian (from India, not a Native American) who was an Oracle certified DBA because he could get away with paying $25K per year less salary for someone geeky enough to eat, sleep, drink and live the insides of an Oracle database, work long hours with no chance of actually getting to use all the comp hours he'd accrue, and the Indian wouldn't mind working in a wide open, noisy office area that didn't even even have cubicle dividers between the desks. This was in Dallas, TX.
No joke.
Probably, But there is blatant feminism. our new head leech...the female that is sucking the life out of our department...is only hiring new WOMEN from a group called WIT..(women in technology) and NOT giving anyone internal a chance to move up. as a result good people are moving out. WIT...how funny...cause none of them have any WITS. It is the distinct feeling among the most of the group that because we dont have tits our careers are over.
CIO: White female
Academic tech: white male (me)
Media Services: black male
Network manager: white male
Server manager: black male
Programmers: two white males, one white female
Staff support: white female
Hardware: white female
Help Desk: one white female, one black male
Total: 9 white, 3 black, 7 men, 5 women.
Seems pretty balanced to me given the local population. Then again, we tend to hire people with little experience and promote from within. (CIO started as a secretary years ago, server manager began as a help desk grunt, etc.)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
There are so few industries like IT where pure chops are the only thing that matters. I don't care if you're a friggin mold... if you can run a server you're hired. There's more than enough "backroom" positions where you can hide bad personalities etc.
Christ! My department is like the freakin UN. I have a Brit, 2 black women, a kid of some undefined ethnicity and Swedish/Puerto Rican!
*I'm the white guy!*
This
Does anyone else find this post racist since they seemed to wait 3 days after the actual holiday to bring it up?!
:P
just another example of slashdot holding down the man
Posting anonymously for a reason...
... unless they are perfect English speaking, tall, men.
... I even asked that outright for both the short and female examples.
I work primarily in the IT contracting arena for the US Federal government, in Washington DC. My employer has everything from network admins to programmers to technical writers. We are extremely diverse (ie, not all white) -- our CEO is a minority. We really don't give a rat's a$$ about your race, creed, etc.
That being said, some of the government managers we try to place people with are extremely racists, biased, etc. My current government manager has rejected candidates for numerous reasons which I consider wrong:
* didn't speak fluent English (he was Russian, but spoke well enough)
* were too short
* were female (my manager is female, very odd!)
And they get away with it. Businesses like my employer are in it purely for the profit, make no mistake. There is a huge amount of cash flowing out of the Federal government right now for contractors, and we can't fill seats fast enough
And none of them were rejected because of their skill sets
So yes, it still happens. Part of the problem is that people are afraid to speak up (myself included).
I think the IT field is a field that has been very fair overall. As a result minorities have made alot of headway into the IT field. So maybe the recruiters comment was made because white IT people are becoming more and more scarce in IT and thus in demand. Hey it's just a speculation.
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I would say racism in hiring persists -- subtly -- in academia. My hopeful prediction is that it will disappear in the next ten to twenty years. It is not longer blatant; more a question of the accumulation of subtle factors over the years. (Also, IMO, sexism is a problem as well, and much more obvious -- some think racism is anathama, but have no problem in discriminating against women.)
Racism is much more blatant at the undergraduate and graduate levels of education (i.e., before you go on the academic job market.) In many cases, it is the result of underprepared minority students not being given the attention and training they need to get up to speed after admissions offices have "taken a chance" on students they think are bright but poorly prepared.
Our universities are some of the most successful institutions in the country; it is natural that politicians would like to shift the burden of solving racism at much earlier levels (elementary, grade and high-school education) to the universities.
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I worked with a sysadmin who happened to be African American (well, back then he was "black"). Anyway, the guy was damn smart, had a Masters, and was well respected by the user community. I've worked with and for other's of a variety of ethnicities and generally come to the conclusion that if they knew their stuff they gained respect. Now I can't speak to racism in corporate America - I'm white as a sheet - but I've seen competence and excellence overcome staff level prejudice.
Maybe the original poster jumped to conclusions. Maybe he was just a crappy worker. But, I can point out countless examples in my career where managers treat their minority employees differently because of fear of lawsuits or EEOC sanctions. Basically, when it comes to these cases, they are heavily weighted for the person lodging the claim and the company has to "prove" that there was no discrimination.
Many companies are scared shitless that they will be targeted under civil rights laws because they appeared to (but actually dont, they just hire the most qualified people who happen to be asian or white for the most part) discriminate against blacks or if they fire a black worker for doing poorly.
Our civil rights laws have brought alot of needed progress to society but they are a double-edged sword, in their current (and largely unchanged form). There is definitely a subculture of minorities out there who like to use their minority status as a crutch and leveraging tool in the workplace.
...have you ever met a Black that reads, or can read? I haven't.
First of all, the guy who told you this is a moron just asking for a lawsuit.
But beyond that, as someone who does way too many interviews every year, I've got to say, I wish I saw more people of any race, sex, or whatever who were good strong people. Not many CS grads are black, for reasons that escape me. Not many are female. If anything, a qualified black or female will get a little bit more consideration, just because they're unusual.
I don't doubt that racism is around in any of its myriad forms, but it took me two years to find an IT job out of college, with an applicable degree and applicable experience, and i'm white. i do know that in all the tech firms i've been around there have been lots of dudes (and a growing number of ladies) from almost every race or country you could name... except for black people. i have seen such a small number of black people working in IT that i'm surprised on the rare occasion i do see it. whether it's a question of race bias in hiring, in education, somewhere else, a combination? i couldn't tell you.
There's racism everywhere. What kind of fairy tale are you living in?
We've just finished a huge round of interviewing IT Account Managers & Engineers. Every engineer was a 'white male' bar one, and all the account maangers were 'white' but a good mix of Male & Female. There definately was a large number of Asian applicants, but most wanted Visa's to work in NZ (Company policy dictates no interview for them until they're here with a visa). Perhaps other races / people need to apply more. Maybe its just a mindset thing that they won't get the job anyway...
I work with about 200+ people in a very large IT department (20,000+ employee corporation). It's probably more diverse than I would have guessed, but it's not really surprising that it isn't all white males. It's fairly well rounded with a a large percentage of not only women (which is great..) but people from all walks of life. It's obvious that IT has some of the brightest and diverse people around, I just can't imagine this sort of thing.
Caucasian? Odd. Back when I was working at an Ivy, it seemed like the archtypal tech nerd was Asian.
I once saw a boss give what I thought was scant interest in Indian greencarders with years of experience on the vitae and Indian grad degrees. Racism, ethnic discrimination, or prudent caution?
Robert Half's book, "Half on Hiring", mentions that his personnel agency occasionally got discriminatory requests. Of course they refused all of them, but the interesting point is this:
Half says that absolutely none of the would-be discriminators were successful companies.
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
White Americans, and Europeans in general, are not very ethnocentric. We tend to be meritocratic, and society has been especaially meritocratic since the 1950s. That means we aren't very racist, either individually or as a society.
We are so non-ethnocentric it is easy to forget it, especially given that some people are continually accusing us of racism.
But, it is always good to make comparisons. E.g. in India or China, who you know, and to whom you are related, is critical. It is hard to get ahead without being in the right group. That's especially true in India.
That's also true -- more true -- in Africa, where tribal association is very important. There are countries where one tribe runs the show -- e.g. Nigeria. Woe unto him born into a weak, powerless tribe, especially if there happens to be oil under your feet.
That's also true in the Arab world. If you are a from a Shiite clan, expect the Sunnis to give you hell. In Iraq, that meant that 20% ran the whole country, because they were Sunni Arabs, and the others were either Kurds, marsh Arabs, Turkmen, Shiites, etc. It is important to keep in mind that in most parts of the world, the religion you worship corresponds to your tribe -- hence this isn't so much sectarian violence, as ethnic violence. Like in Ireland -- Protestants aren't Irish who converted (for the most part) to a different religion, but people who immigrated from Scotland. They are from a different gene pool.
Ireland, due to the conflicts, is more ethnocentric than Great Britain, or America. This is a typical social identity effect: put groups in conflict, and they'll start sorting each other out, picking on the other group and so on. That's natural animal behavior. As a result, if you want to get ahead, you'd better be related to the right crowd.
That's true in Israel too, a very ethnocentric place. You'd better be in the right group, depending on what you want to do. E.g. want to succeed in an area where Sephardim succeed? Better be Sephardi.
I've never seen anything like this in America. I've worked at a number of companies, and always the issue was just, "can you do the work," and not, what genes do you have. Well, not quite: I worked for some Indians, and all the management jobs went to Indians -- but that just proves my point.
It is true that blacks haven't been prevalent among the programmers, but I think isn't explained by racism. This is a very controversial view, but supported along the following reasoning: various things, like height or reaction time are different among different ethnic groups. To the extent that IQ is a hereditable phenomenon, different groups have different average IQs, just as we have different average heights. That explains the outcomes. This is especially true, given all the money the government has poured into trying to get brown and black people to succeed in science (and why didn't they pour money into helping Chinese succeed in basketball?).
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
It's Flair. Not flare. They're homonyms.
Are you sure? There are no shortage of Asians in the Ivy Leagues, Engineering programs, Mathematics, or CS.
At UTD, the chinks outnumber us probably 2 or 3 to 1 on the graduate level.
however, i would call IT an avenue to fight racism. programming, or any technically involved task, encourages meritocracy: either you can do the complicated task, or you can't. in other words, the more complicated the job, the less incentive there is for ignoring innate abilities. in other fields, where the work required is more rote and simple, other, more fickle reasons can come into play in choosing an employee, reasons like racism
it would be, for example, a lot easier to get away with hiring only white secretaries rather than only white IT workers. simply because a lot of people can do a secretary's job, so your selection criteria can be more and more shallow. but your business will suffer to your more enlightened competitors if you pass up on real talent in a limited pool for a shallow reason. therefore, the job market in highly technical fields takes care of racism all by itself. IT simply can't afford to be racist. to ignore a technically astute individual for the whim of skin color is too heavy a price for an employer to pay
and of course, this issue is framed in an era when IT departments everywhere are farming all of their work out to india! where's rudyard kipling to laugh at when you need him? "white man's burden?" pffft. well that's deliciously ironic dear mr. kipling: a century after you penned those patronizing condescending words suggesting how nonwhite peoples were naturally the "inferior" wards of "superior" europeans, your "superior" europeans are rapidly becoming the wards of nonwhite peoples. the entire information infrastructure of the western world is rapidly becoming the "brown man's burden"
so to speak of racism in IT is rather obtuse. IT is definitely one of the more egalitarian work fields in the worlds in terms of proportionate racial representation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Accents.
While most of their other positions were filled, I eager to obtain just about any job computer/IT related, I applied for a data entry position. Being more of a wider variety of people that are hired for such a position I figured I had a shot, since you didn't need a big time degree from a four year school.
So the day of my interview, I do what I was taught to do: I present myself as professional as I could. Freshly ironed dress slack pants, freshly ironed dress shirt with appropriate tie. Polished shoes, and even went as far as to get a hair cut the day before just to keep it all well rounded. With me I brought additional copies of my resume both hard and soft copy. As well as copies of my coverletter and references, all neatly typed up myself as clean and neat as you can make it.
I go through the whole process, interview which I thought went well, the little test they gave me to measure my speed of typing I took pretty well. They wanted 9500 words an hour with 0 mistakes, I got around 7000 which I thought was still a respectable number.
The kicker of the situation is, there must have been at least half a dozen people applying for the same position. They had maybe twenty open spots for this position so I figured 1 out of 20 isn't too bad of odds. Every one else there, was so unprofessional it made me so angry..
With no opinion on race, the other people there to interview where as follows:
- Two middle eastern gentlemen, one somewhat elderly the other middle aged. Neither spoke English very well and often had to ask other interviewee's for assistance when they were filling out their application. Neither was dressed appropriately, wearing denim jackets, jeans, and tennis shoes.
- One young middle eastern woman who wore a partial veil, the one that doesn't cover the face. She appeared to speak English well, but also dressed inappropriately with just a dress and tennis shoes.
- One young african american woman, spoke typical American English yet was dressed horribly. She wore a t-shirt, jeans, a flashy pocketbook and bright colored hairpins. She looked like she was going to hang out at a local mall, not apply for job of this field.
- One middle aged african american woman. Other than myself she was probably the most appropriate for the job, dressed in nice womans dress pants, with a matching blouse. Hair neatly tucked back, appropriate dress shoes.
None of them appeared to have a resume on hand, references or a cover letter. This was a company, here in America so I was quite shocked people who barely spoke English and knew no Spanish were being considered for a job that requires fluent English. While my opinion of race has no bearing on something like this, simple professionalism really means alot in these situations.
I was not chosen for any of the positions, though I don't know if the others I described got one either.
I'm American, born and raised. I'm causasian, "white" as it's always called. While I can understand how some think race will always play a part, alot of times it happens to "white" people too. Even if it was a professionalism ordeal it still can be played aganist "white" people just like it can any other race.
Aw Frell this
If you don't sound white over the phone, you might not even get an interview. If you don't look white in the interview, you might not "fit in".
Luckily I'm a young white guy with a college degree (in English no less--never taken a computer course), and I've had no doors unneccessarily closed to me. I'm now an SMS admin, among other things.
I've probably been hired over some better-qualified minorities (or women--they are also still rare in IT). The only reason I suspect this is because I'm simply not very qualified to work in IT. Not knowing the exact details about the other candidates, I'm only marginally more qualified to make statements along these lines than some Randbot complaining about "reverse-racism" or "whitesploitation" or whatever they're trying to convince people exists this week. (Confidential to Randbot: did you ever think that maybe they hired the lesser-qualified minority because he wasn't an asshole?)
The only time race works against you is in salary. White people cost too much, generally speaking, unless they're in Ireland.
If rascism means business wanting a pretty first world face to front up for a third world development team. Then the answer would be yes, I have experienced it. I don't believe there's any real rascism, other than a general preconception that if you were born in India, Pakistan, Africa, or some post soviet country, that you'll accept anywhere between 1/10th to 1/2 what a first world developer would. In time I believe this will all even out. Not that I believe the third world is going to be pulled up to first world standards, I just think business will continue to squeeze the labour market till we're all willing to work on the same basis.
Its surprising companies dont like to throw away money to meet racist quotas?
As a black man myself, my own experiences in the IT field have been rather positive. In fact, I would rank my work environments as some of the most "incident free" places I've experienced. I attribute this partly to the nature of the field itself, as it favors intelligent open-minded people. We're also mostly from newer generations and, therefore, aren't as engrained in the racist attitudes of the past.
And you know that they hired these people rather than you based on race...how exactly?
I don't think I've even been given specific reasons why I wasn't offered jobs after interviews, usually just a "we've decided to go with someone else, thanks for your time". (If I heard back anything at all; many times it's just been a silence.)
Maybe your estimation of your own qualifications is incorrect. Maybe you asked for too much money. Maybe they didn't think you'd be a good "organization fit".
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
I am a entrprise IT instructor and have 12 new students from large companies every week. Guessing I would say white men between between 30 to 50 yrs old make up %90 + of my American and European students. The remainin g 10% are mainly Asian men, Indian men, or women - exreemly few are African American. Of the thousands of international students I have had over the years - I don't recall ever having a black African student, and extreemly few Arab.
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that the chances of my getting accepted to a certain university would be better if I specified 'white' instead of 'asian' as my race.
The admissions office said "off the record" that asians were over-represented based on U.S. population and that all things being equal, they'd admit a white instead of the asian applicant.
Feels like a twilight zone episode...welfare for the extremely wealthy, racial quotas benefitting majority race, politician trying to destroy separation of church&state calling themselves patriotic, politicians intentionally letting illegals flood across our borders while claiming we're in a war that requires Americans to give up our liberties, 60+ elected leaders currently under investigation for bribery&corruption, and so on.
Why not level the playing field so that all companies/corporations qualify for the same benefits? What is wrong with competing based on merit? Why not secure our southern border? Why not encourage high-quality immigrants (remember Einstein?) that want to obey laws instead of spreading fear about racial & religious intolerance? Why not have a flat income tax with the annual exemption equal to the U.S. poverty line?
Some of the smartest folks who've trained me over the past ten years have not been white. When I was taking my technical courses in the mid-1990s, my NetWare instructor was from Ethiopia. When I took my Microsoft technical training, my first instructor was Indian and the next one was Asian. I took several Microsoft SQL courses to become an MCDBA and the instructor for all three was the same very sharp black man. The class took him out to dinner after our last session and, after a couple of beers, he admitted to us how much he was being paid (as an MCT) for teaching and it astonished many of us. When he wasn't overbooked teaching classes, he was highly in demand for his consulting skills. He was an inspiration to me, and I sure hope I can someday be worth $300,000 a year.
In short, I don't think racism is nearly as much of a problem in the IT field these days as it used to be. And when you can demonstrate your worth to an employer before they even know your ethnicity, race becomes irrelevant (as it always should be).
At the time that I quit my last job, I left a single American born member in the team:
1 english, 1 irish, 1 dutch, 1 taiwanese, 1 vietnamese, 1 chinese, and 3 asian indian. The single American-born [or even American raised/accented] was the director over the rest.
I've seen the exact opposite. Minorities get hired over caucasians all the time just so the companies can meet thier "qoutas". I'm not trying to downplay the importance of equality, but they are still hiring based on race, so that's not really equality anyway.
I'll tell you where--we're no further along the road to equal rights than we were when King marched. The only difference now versus then is there are no colored entrances.
Racism still abounds--both in America and around the world. People are still paranoid, xenophobic, prejudiced, racist fucks that all deserve to be shot.
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that you're an idiot!
"I recently had a recruiter tell me that I would have no problem finding a job in the current economy - not because I am enthusastic, well-educated and have good experience - but because I am caucasian - 'white'."
I would question the validity of any statement that suggested that there is correlation between today's economy, and the degree of racism in a given field. What is the [supposed] relationship. Would companies be more likely to hire minorities if the economy was worse, or if it were better? In my experience racism has nothing to do with logic, but I wish I were there to hear that one, and throw a question or two back at him
ME>
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Many companies are scared shitless that they will be targeted under civil rights laws because they appeared to (but actually dont, they just hire the most qualified people who happen to be asian or white for the most part) discriminate against blacks or if they fire a black worker for doing poorly.
Now would be a good time to provide newspaper accounts of such things. Yes, I'm sure if this happened, many would be unreported. But surely there is one good man or woman out there who will speak up with a specific example?
While you're digging that up (no, angry bloggers don't count) perhaps you'd like to read the socialist-communist-worker's party's political organ, Businessweek, whose 2001 article claimed "in an increasingly multicultural U.S., harassment of minorities is on the rise".
There is definitely a subculture of minorities out there who like to use their minority status as a crutch and leveraging tool in the workplace.
Perhaps. Whenever there is a law, even a just law like EOA, there will be people who will try to use it for their personal gain. What is without doubt it that there is a subculture of white people who have gained and retain a significant advantage in the workplace on account of their race.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
The fact is that there aren't that many minority graduates in engineering. How many African-American students did you see in your 300 level engineering/math/cs courses? Chances are if there were any they were really good, but probably there weren't enough of them to balance out the ratios at IT companies. This goes back all the way to high school (think of your AP classes). I don't know what happens, but somehow African-Americans stop going for the AP classes and engineering degrees. Maybe they buy into this discrimination/racism gap and stop going for it. Or maybe it's a culture thing where smart people are looked down on more in the African-American culture. But the fact of it is, there are fewer candidates, and from the number of candidates, you still have to pick the best ones. You have a white candidates that's more qualified than a black candidate, then the only reason to go with the black candidate is to diversify, and that would be racism too.
You NASCAR people make me sick, and I'll use every trick in the book to make sure you don't get promoted or even hired.
At one point in my career I was a team leader for an IT group, both my manager (a woman) and I interviewed a female candidate and both I (for technical reasons) and my mgr (for personality reasons) didn't think that we should hire this candidate.
Our second line manager said we needed to hire this candidate as a matter of diversity (the IT group was 10 guys of varying races).
It wasn't like we couldn't find qualified candidates, it's just that they were all men, and when a woman came along our 2nd line manager forced us to hire her.
This woman didn't know how to reboot a solaris box and later took out one of our larger SANs.
To this day when I interview somebody, I tell my peers/mgmt that if somebody isn't qualified, I won't recommend them 'no matter what our diversity training requires'
Big investment bank, NYC. 5000+ IT employees.
Suppose you submit a resume -
1. You are automatically hired if you are an IIT ( Indian institute of tech) grad.
2. If you are Indian & not IIT, you get a shot at the interview...ace that & you're in.
3. If you are not Indian...if you're ivy material, automatically hired.
4. Not Indian, not ivy...interview if you are white and from the USAF, marines & such. They're big on defence personnel...integrity, loyalty, whatever else military teaches you I guess. Ace interview, you're in.
5. Not Indian, not ivy, not white...resume hits trashcan.
The company I work for has very few blacks or whites working for them. It's not a US-based company, and though it's headquarters are here, many of the employees are from overseas.
At least on the IT side, of about 50 here there are 4 whites, and no blacks. In HQ, there are no more than maybe 15 whites, and 3 blacks - the rest being Indian, Chinese and Japanese (and a few other nationalities I'd guess).
For people claim that whites are the ones getting preferential treatment in hiring, all I can say is that the shoe is occasionally on the other foot. Do I care? No - they pay me, people are generally pleasant, and I figure that if I was able to get in the door, another white or black could get in given the right timing and skillsets.
Do they occasionally choose someone based on race? Absolutely. However, a lot of that comes down to the applicant's ability to speak the language, and that sort of thing. Therefore, while I don't like not being on the same playing field, I'm getting a fair enough shot that it doesn't hold me back significantly.
Does that "significantly" descriptor play a factor in the likelihood that I'll stay here though? You bet your ass. While I've been with these folks for about 6 years, it's made enough of an impression that if I was given another job offer and my company matched it, I'd leave.
Yes, there is some discrimination going on, but it is very subtle. Most of it is age discrimination though, not racial. Nobody wants to hire older guys, because they are perceived as being too expensive.
In terms of racial lines, it seems to be discrimination against Africans in general and I mean real Africans, people that were born and raised there, because their training is perceived as low quality, compared to other parts of the world.
Oh well, what the hell...
These claims are false.
They may or may not be, but citing a government publication stating how the act is intended to work, doesn't make a definitive case.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm guarnteed a job in IT just because I'm white? I had no idea. I could introduce you to many other long-term unemployed whites - all very experienced and well educated - although most are 40.
Overt racism is fairly rare in the United States. As much as some people rail against big corporations, the idea of not picking the best qualified people for a job is a terrible idea. Any corporation that decided to make that a part of their corporate culture would find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
I know that the whole idea of Affirmative Action was to break down the barriers of the GOB system and that corporate culture that stereotypes people into roles. But now we have people who complain that they are being passed over jobs because company x has to 'hire a chick' or some other belief that they are somehow better qualified for a job. Hence the backlash against AA. In a large enough pool of applicants (And I can promise you, the IT field has a large enough field), The differences between person A who is the bottom person to get the job, and person X, the bubble boy/girl, is insiginificant. I'm sure there are exceptional cases out there where a person who was dramaticly more qualified didn't get a job over someone who was significantly less qualified, but they are rare and at best anecdotal cases.Reverse Racism runs into the same problem that Racism would in a Corporate Setting.
We've all head horror stories of someone getting 'shafted' by AA, but an individual case does not a systemic problem, make.
Having a hispanic last name leads to some odd quirks, such as mail and telephone calls that are in spanish, I learned 'no hablo espanol, si habla ingles.' a while ago *laughs*. As far as my experience finding work in the industry, I'd say it's irrelevant.
Are we at a place in society where we are corporate colorblind? I'd say we're pretty close. Individuals may need some work, but there's too much at stake not to hire the best people for jobs.
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
I just got a Network Admin job with a Fortune 500 company and I am straight up Mexican. I even look Mexican. I think it all comes down to having the right education, credentials and reccomendations. And a security clearance helps too!
I hate people different from me: including my girlfriend, negros and blacks.
I am purple with yellow spots due to an alien condition.
hello!
we come in peace!
lay down your weapons, we come in peace, if you do not comply in 10 seconds we will blow the planet. 10..9..8...
Age tends to be an issue because to older you get, the less bullshit you are inclined to put up with from employers for shit wages. Human Resources knows this, and so they go for the young and hungery employee who doesn't have many obligations beyond party money.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The problem is probably the lack of educated black engineers. Up until a few years ago, here at the University of Washington, you could get a free ticket into the college if you were black or hispanic. But those minorities were also dropping out at frightening rates. And the ones that did graduate weren't graduating in the hard sciences. I imagine this is generally true across the country.
My father remembers working as an EE in a firm where they hired a token black guy to avoid threats of being racist. They brought the guy in, gave him a desk, and set him up for work. After a few conversations, the black guy freely admitted that he was there because he was black. He wasn't dumb. He wasn't totally incapable. He just wasn't at the same level of ability as the other engineers, and didn't have much desire to get there. I imagine if he faced the same threats of getting laid off or becoming obsolete, he would've worked just as hard as the others to make sure he was a good engineer. But there was no motivation because there was no threat.
With the passage of I-200 (banning the use of race as an entrance criteria), the graduation rate at UW has been climbing and the admittance rate or minorities has been restored to pre-I-200 levels. (Although, the Asians are much higher and the whites are much lower nowadays.) The general sentiment from the people I talk to is that blacks and hispanics are working harder in high school if they have college aspirations.
Overall, I believe folks in the IT world, being more highly educated, are far less racist than the less-educated professions. I say this from experience. I don't have any black people that I know of on my floor of the building. I imagine there are some somewhere in our company. But I also know that if there were a black guy, he would be treated the same way we treat each other, along with having to adhere to the same expectations.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I have been in the position where I was forced to hire someone of minority status in order to meet a quota. Those who say this ever happens are deluding themselves. It's an attempt to redress past wrongs, but it does hurt some people in the process.
The problem with age discrimination is that a lot of companies don't look at the employees as "old" as much as they look at them as benefit-hogs. Considering all of the raises that an employee can get over 20 years, pension liabilities and vacation time, a lot of companies will cut the "benefit-hogs" first, then replace them with a younger person that'll do the same job for 20% less. Do that five times and you can afford to add an additional person.
That doesn't mean that it's right, but it's not based on age as much as it is based on economics.
For the record, I don't think of old employees as benefit hogs, I think they've earned it. But a lot of upper management does consider them to be - and never consider the "earned it" factor.
I was recently hired by a major software company in the USA.
On my team, we have Chinese, Indian, some from the middle east, one or two I'm guessing are from Spain, a few North American born and bred (including Canadians... haha!), several Eastern Europeans.
We have no women, but in sister teams I see a few, at least in a ratio that I would call normal for software.
So no, no racism here.
Back at my University, you noticed a bit of that. Most professors would hire the best candidates regardless of, but then there'd be one or two who would exclusively accept Egyptian students or something.
Racism is out there, but it's disappearing. Most techies I know don't really care which races they work with anymore, more on other issues like the skill and qualifications. They may still have racial tendancies, but they save them for their personal lives.
From my perspective in the IT industry, no, there is not hardly any discrimination in hiring practices. I've worked in a few different jobs and all were fairly diverse (proportional probably to the actual racial/sex representations). What people look at is your accomplishments, research, etc.
However, I would be willing to say that there are discriminatory practices with regards to internships and scholarships. I come from a very poor family which currently has no income at all. My high school was horrible, e.g. only 20% of the students in 10th-12th grade could pass a basic algaebra 1 standardized test. I have a very respectable gpa, with a constant 3.5, in major and out. Yet I doubt many people would believe the lack of opportunities and/or assistance available to me. I would say somewhere around 50% of the internships, and around 80% of the scholarships for CS students focus heavily on race instead of economic/educational background.
Companies like Microsoft are notorious for being eager to deal out internships to people of any race which isn't white (and, recently, isn't Indian), as can be noted here. From the link:
While all candidates who meet the criteria for eligibility described below may apply, a large majority of our scholarships will be awarded to female students, underrepresented minority students, and students with disabilities. Minority applicants must be a member of one of the following groups underrepresented in the software field: African-American, Hispanic, or Native American.
But it isn't just private corporations trying to make themselves look culturally sensitive, many universities have similar practices. I was extremely excited last semester when I received an email telling me about a summer internship at UC Berkeley, which the email described as targeting "first generation, low income, students with little chance for research", I matched all 3 criteria and was very excited. However, when I went to look at the application I noticed something very peculiar--there was nothing about income, instead it requires your ethnicity.
Now I'm not saying that all schools do things like that, and yes it's possible that my advisor simply misunderstood the description she was given about the scholarship. I'm actually not even very upset about most of it all. My problem is that people seem to use the argument that because of past racism, other races need to be helped along wherever possible, so as to create a better and more equal society. The problem is, how is any of that equal? You're just saying that people need extra help soley because of their race. It seems like if you're concerned that there are so many people of race x in economic class y, then maybe you should be looking at people's economic status instead of their race. If this is the case, then scholarships will go out to the people of race x that really need them, instead of giving them to both the poor and the more fortunate simply because of their skin color.
i recently left a job at a steel company. when they decide if they are going to hire someone they put them to an actual test...they hire welders if they can sit there and weld a vertical weld without it being a crappy weld. IT departments should follow this procedure and only hire people who can fix real world problems such as figuring out why a certain computer wont boot and endlessly reboots because a certain USB harddrive was plugged in. or if they can figure out how to open a simple ascii file named .doc when the computer doesnt have microsoft office (yes use any text editor). these examples seem very simple but its small stuff like this that can determine whether you are experienced enough to make it in a company or fall to the wayside as someone who got their MCSE for 20K dollars and doesnt know anything about how computers actually work.
I have worked in IT over 25 years. I have seen this. It does happen.
Could you please enlighten us by telling us how the hell you got that info? I have not ever gotten, or heard of anyone getting any info about why they lost their job (except once, it was an internal position, and I found out from the person who took the new job because my current position dealt with that existing role).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Once again it is demonstrated that recruiters are useless... -- Monday is a lousy way to spend 1/7th of your life
Ability to communicate clearly with the rest of the team is vital in pretty much any IT job above the level of scutwork. In the US that (usually) means that you must be able to speak, and write, in clear, easy to understand English.
If you can't communicate clearly with the interviewer and recruiter, then you won't be able to communicate clearly with the rest of your team. That significantly decreases your value as a hire.
I've lived and worked in NYC for many years, specifically in the IT field for 7 years in NYC. While working there, when it came to programming positions, I found the majority of the developers were caucasian. Many places I went to were like this. In addition to that, we would have the various number of people from overseas, such as the Russians, Chineses, and Indians, but very few from established minority groups from the US, specifically Blacks and Latinos. Now this wasn't necessarily tied to racism, but more of an economic situation; the infamous digital divide.
I now work in South Florida, and the work environment looks much better; we have a decent mixing of backgrounds. But for this situation to improvement around the US, there needs to be a better education system setup for those in the low income areas. Companies and foundations need to make the effort to improve the quality of life for those, who may not get the opportunity.
Of course this is all antecdotal, but when I first got out of college, I was told by one of my interviewers (a staffing company that was hiring VMS sysops for a huge multinational) that they were being told specificially to not hire any white males for any of the entry-level positions, because the company was receiving a lot of bad publicity for not being "diverse enough".
That's the neat part about the nation's obsession with skin color, we've managed to find a way to discriminate against everybody.
I remember once a game I played that if you were wearing glasses, you were appearing 10 to 20% smarter than you really were to other people. Guess what, this is true in IT. If you wear glasses, chances that you get hired in IT are highter.
Ps: Do not apply this concept to girls, wearing glasses will scare away 10 to 20% girls.
The best excuse for a President, a King or others *insert your words*, is God. God has still yet to find an excuse.
I think what may be being percieved as racism may not be -- it may be communication preferences. For example, I am not racist. I don't hate anyone for their race. However, I have a strong preference for speaking to someone that can communicate effectively in English. And I think that is where the backlash towards outsourcing came from: companies attempting to save money resulted in frustrated customers, when the customers were perfectly happy before with the service they were recieving. Anyone that has spent time on a tech-support hotline or has tried to get something RMA'ed has probably experienced the "C as in Cali-fornia, F as in Flori-e-duh" sad attempt at American English with the Far East accesents. I think that any field is going to have a degree of rasicm. That is bound to happen. But in IT, with the visability, and the required communication skills, some employers may prefer the "white caucasion male" because at least the 90-year old grandma attempting to use AOL can at least understand him than the "female Indonessian Muslim." Computers frustrate a lot of users, and the non-geek crowd get especially frustrated with them. Why frustrate the users more by having communicate with someone that can't communicate effectively back and still have a non-working computer. Think about it. When it starts to affect the bottom line of a company, and it is not rooted towards race but towards skill, then it may not be racism at all. Now with that said, I have a friend that is a Pakastiani that you wouldn't know is one, because his communication skills are that of a native American. He does a great job in IT and is well liked.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
First, I'm biracial.
Secondly, I've been discriminated against more than once. It has never hurt me or affected me -- the business didn't like my race. I found other work instantly.
Once the Internet hit its momentum, I have to turn work away -- every week.
I believe that racism is a stupid but voluntary act of association. I really hate laws "protecting against" racism -- they don't help minorities, and I believe they hurt "us."
In every market, thanks to the Internet, jobs are always available. If 1 business doesn't want you, another will. The racist business will likely be less profitable if they care about race rather than performance.
As a business owner (multiple) I have the law against discrimination -- it scares me and it limits me.
I have to think twice on whoever I hire as I've seen customers of mine get sued for discrimination (when none was there). It is my business, I should be free to associate with whomever i want to. Note that I've hired every race (and even a transexual once), I just think twice when it comes to certain stereotypes that I've seen a high ratio of lawsuits from with other businesses I work with.
I don't know about the rest of the US, but I've been working in IT in Silicon Valley for almost 6 years now, after emigrating here from Canada and I haven't seen any racism yet. Folks here are too busy for that kind of nonsense. I'm a non-white male.
I'm a white, North American-born individual and sometimes use recruiters/agencies to find work. I work in non-computer engineering.
Apparently, including a photo with a CV is a bad thing according to an agency I once used, because prospective employers can judge on that.
..'coz none of my posts reach a 5 mark and only 2 out of 18 stories got posted at Slashdot
If you are a male who happens to be white, straight, and Christian, you are 100% unprotected.
of course there is racism everywhere in a society based on a 300 year old color caste system. But that skin color caste was created by the colonial elite 300 years ago so as to prevent mixed race slave rebellions. To quote historian Edmund Morgan, the colonial elite thwarted rebellions of black slaves and white slaves/poor whites by seperating them with a "screen racial contempt." The elite did this by creating laws in colonial America that would place the poor whites and slave whites ABOVE the blacks in the social hierarchy. This added social status boost tied the poor whites the upper class whites by the color of their skins. For example, the elites passed a law that white slaves could no longer be flogged naked, but that black slaves could be flogged naked. Up to that time, black slaves and poor whites/ indentured whites worked side by side and lived together. They were roughly equal in social status--being on the bottom.
But the American plantation plutocrats of the 1600s learned from the mixed race slave uprisings of Haiti--they knew that they had to seperate the blacks and poor whites.
So they used their political poor. And remember that most whites could not vote in those days--property qualifications meant the lower 60% or so could not vote.
So over the next 100 years or so, the poor whites that were born in colonial America were born into a society based on a skin color caste. And we take the world as it appears to us. The whites did not create the skin color caste--the ELITE did. Don't blame white people for it. This color caste society is simply the water we swim in. Do you think it would be any different if the roles were reversed?
Of course the rich plutocrats have used their wealth to create a fauxleft centered in identity politics and white-hating multiculturalism. They did this over the last 40 years by using the non profit foundations to fund identity politics writers and activists. They GREW a fauxleft.
more here:
http://www.leftwingmediamachine.blogspot.com/
Lamest troll post in a loooong time. If there is any discrimination out there, it is the reverse kind, where minorities receive preferential treatment to fill quotas. Get real.
Although there's a downward trend in overt racism in America (it's not PC to be a racist), overall racism hasn't changed a whole lot. The "subtle" racism now means people might even claim they aren't racist but will still act in a racist way in a more subtle manner. For example, they won't throw all the black applicants out of the resume pile before they look at anything, but they will toss a black applicant out when it comes down to two equally qualified people. Problem is, it's more difficult to "catch" people being racist like this, especially if they're not really aware of it themselves. So yeah, it's still there.
IMO geeks are too geeky to be occupied with issues of race. Hey, there are Linux partitions to format. I'm a black male far too experienced with racism and the poorly-disguised look of awe the first time someone sees me after we've talked on the phone. IT interviews are the only ones I've walked into and never drawn a discernable reaction. IT offices are among the most integrated as previous posts have shown.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I'd like to think that in large corporations in the US, race is usually not a factor in hiring/firing. Now inter-office politics, and employee friendships, race seems to play a bigger factor, but it seems to be less of an issue in hiring.
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
I went to a tech school with majority blacks. Or at least half the school was at least. I've yet to run into one black system administrator.
- when the customers were perfectly happy before with the service they were recieving.
what? i mean...what?? On which planet? They weren't happy, but at least they could understand the words.Like "this culture works harder than that culture", or "that race of people work for less money than the other", or "All those out sourced folks are XYZ-ing us because of some racial/cultural issue". And they evolve into stereotypes which comedians exploit! The thing is that people and corporations are exploiting one's race for benefit vs. what we've been taught (e.g. racism == oppression). In the end it's still racism. In some case exploitation can create a win-win situation compared to the racism as described by MLK.
Back in the old days we hired Bynars only as a pair (1+0), but nowadays we also hire detached Zeros.
The company I worked for would not hire Blacks...or Hispanics...or non-Christians! They justified it by not going public, and remaining a family run business. And supposedly, because they were under 15 employees, they could get away with it. I had to go to the Fundie Church with the Mother and Father owners before they hired me...I guess to make sure I wasn't some Satan Spawn that would melt in the prescence of God...Oh, yes, it was a Church of God.
:-(
I also dated a Black lady, and I believe that is part of why I lost my job.
Thankfully, I am no longer in Charlotte, North Carolina!!!!! It's still segregated, even if not by law...Blacks live on the West side of Interstate 77, and Whites East of it.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
I notice I had lower chances of being hired due to my physical disabilities: 1) Don't drive a vehicle and 2) impediments with speech and hearing. It took me a year to get a full-time job (2001-2002) after interviewed about 20 times with different employers. Also, I had a job developer, from Employment Development Department (EDD), to assist me.
/.aholic, and hired me at a well known security company.
I was lucky to find someone, who was also a
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
So which is it, that you would never ever hire a minority unless you were "forced," or that you're entirely color-blind in your dealings, but oops, too bad, there are no qualified minorities in the entire country?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The simple fact is that white men don't sue based on racism or sexism when let go or fired. There is that risk with minorities and women, regardless of how large or small. I've seen it happen several times now... You look and think, "Why did they keep that guy? He has no skills..." You know why? Fear of lawsuits.
I'm sorry to say it, and someone will accuse me of racism. Still, I remember a very good black friend of mine flat out telling me that the only reason I was laid off and he was kept was because he was black. He knew as well as I did. And he wouldn't have sued for being laid off, but so it goes...
[FromTheMorning]
Hmm ... even if you claimed to have lost only one job to a minority purely based on race I would have a hard time believing it, not because I believe it doesn't happen, but because it's simply not something employees find out about. "You're fired because we need to meet our quota" ... I just don't see an employer saying that.
Most people who lose their jobs don't know who their replacements are and most certainly do not know what the qualifications or salaries of their replacements are. In fact, at my office, they make it a point not to share salary information with others. Maybe your replacement was simply willing to work for less? More likely, maybe all four employers saw something in you they did not like and it was a coincidence that a minority replaced you?
On the other hand, you might have good reason to believe that you were let go due to some 'minority quota', so if you do please share it with us. Otherwise I'm inclined to believe that you are in denial about some shortcoming of your own, which all four employees were able to identify.
It usually feels better to blame others but in the end you're only hurting yourself by not correcting whatever may be causing you to lose so many jobs.
We should avoid using the term "reverse racism" to refer to people discriminating against non-minorities! No matter the skin colors involved, racism is still racism plain and simple!
Racism is always unproductive and injurious, no matter who is being racist against whom!
The only true "reverse racism" is acceptance and equal treatment of your fellow human regardless of his skin color, ethnic background or manner of speech.
Now would be a good time to provide newspaper accounts of such things.
Newspaper accounts? That's like saying if you see it on tv, it must be true. I'm not saying everything in the newspaper is false, but come on.
While you're digging that up (no, angry bloggers don't count) perhaps you'd like to read the socialist-communist-worker's party's political organ, Businessweek, whose 2001 article claimed "in an increasingly multicultural U.S., harassment of minorities is on the rise".
Same goes for magazines. You can choose to trust them, but I would research the topic first. The same way I would if I were reading a blog. Bottom line is, the only thing I trust is personal experience, and I don't see this bias towards minorities in the workplace. I do see a bias towards lazy and stupid, which anyone can be.
And on a side note, why are we asking for proof when the topic in questions was brought up because someone claimed some recruiter told him minorities are discriminated against? For all we know, the original poster is nothing more than a troll.
I don't doubt some people are discriminated against, the same as I don't doubt minorities get preferencial treatment at some companies. I'm just saying I have yet to see either happening on a scale worth my time to think about during a bowel movement.
Lighten up. Its only a post.
"Racism" can be found wherever you look for it. Of course, not hiring someone because of skin color is not necessarily racism. Racism is the believe that people of one race are intrinsically superior to people of other races, not one race not hiring a person of another race - that's discrimination.
In a free country, people are allowed to discriminate, but the government is not. Here, we have it the other way around - government is allowed to discriminate but people are not. If someone doesn't want to hire me because of my race, bfd. There are plenty of jobs, and they'll be worse off over the long haul for such narrow minded practices.
Discrimination is kept alive by people like Jesse Jackson, who otherwise would be out of a career. Discrimination is propped up by "affirmative action" laws. Want to end it? Let's get back to a government that truly has equal protection under the law.
One time we were interviewing a person of color for an IT position. He was clearly lacking, but this was the bay area and IT help was hard to come by at the time, and I felt pressure that if we turned him away I would be accused of racist hiring practices. So we hired him, and it wasn't a week later before he wasn't found shooting up hard drugs ( which showed in his performance long before, making me look really bad ) . The receptionist, who was also a lady of color, cried because "he embarrased her whole race".
From then out, I've had the attitude - that this is not a disenlightened profession. If a person of color fails to get a job for because of race, he should be thankfull that he won't be required to work arround such shallow people. I say let racist employers suffer the natural consequences of not getting the best people for the job. They will suffer long before a good IT professional does.
being in the IT field for 20+years, 10 at the present company.. I, like others, are looked over for advancement, even showing dedication to the company, long hours, and very thorough, courteous and all the other traits you look for.. still I have not progressed in the chain.. They hire others over me for the positions that I have worked long hours and proven myself to be worthy of. And even worse the person hired over me has less experience than I .. every time.. Sure it is dependant on the company.. but I would say that a hell of a lot of companies are the same as mine.. All I can say is it is in God's hands. You will eventually reap the benefits of your labor.. or at least so I have been told many times over :)....
You know, sometimes I think us asians have the IT market (except the management) all around. Maybe its just the places I've visited, but white IT guys are disproportionately less compared to asians, while being more compared to blacks.
I'm just glad the EO card cant be used against me.
As far as racism in IT hiring practices go, its the same level of racism you'll find elsewhere in other fields. Such racism is also more important where there are plenty of techies like A+ and MCSEs (you can pick and choose people according to your 'corporate culture'), and less so where you need someone with a CCIE as well as 6 years experience in SAP financial modules, and will grab whatever walks by.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Why can't it be that he was simply "forced" by upper management to hire based on race to fill a quota. There are obviously qualified people of all races out there. Maybe none of them applied for the job. Maybe they did. The point is he had been pressured to fill a quota, whether the guy was ultimately the most qualified or not.
I can relate to that, I've been put in the same position (and being a white male it was made clear that MY job was on the line if I didn't go along with it and hire based on color rather than qualification)...
In Alberta, and I expect all of Canada, such hiring practises are illegal. Is this practise common in the bible belt? And is it legal?
There's still racism in 2006. IT isn't special. We're just like the rest of the population, except we're totally full of ourselves.
Idiots.
Probably more with all the overseas outsourcing. Perhaps I should say the perceived outsourcing, as it doesn't matter if it's real, or how much there is, but rather how much people feel like there is.
It's been completely outsourced to India....I shit you not.
I love reading the broken English in the emails I get from TAC staff.
What happened to all the "caucasians" who used to work at TAC?
I have found that there is issue with the Cultural background of North American Europeans vs. Asian or more percise Chinese.
What I experience was where a persons personal cultural experience makes them hire their Culture. How to tell is what type of person that person can hold a conversation with. In the end it hurts the team and company if someone can not work cross cultures.
You think we'd hire some piece of shit chink who can hardly communicate? Fuck that.
You have to realize something about those jobs. It's not an hasard that they are being out-sourced, it's that no one, in his right mind like to do such a job, except if they are paid very big bucks for it. That would had happened sooner or later. People move on from these jobs to better things, specialy since everyone are getting more and more frustrated with the technology becoming more and more complex every day. Frustrating technology makes frustrating businesses that makes frustrating people and frustrating people make frustrating businesses that look at alternative technologies for even more frustrating results! is'nt that great!
The best excuse for a President, a King or others *insert your words*, is God. God has still yet to find an excuse.
Poster generalises about a whole region of the United States people based on her experience at ONE Mom n Pop small business.How is that different from stereotyping about race,sex,preference etc on a single negative personal or anecdotal experience?
No, the claim, as stated, is clearly wrong. Tge law does not REQUIRE less-qualified individuals to be hired. However, it's more convenient to assuage someone by telling them that they lost to a less-qualified minority than it is to look them in the face and admit to them that all things considered, they simply didn't make the grade.
In addition, some companies on their own choose to resort to a quota-like system out of laziness or incomplete understanding of the law. Plenty of people overpay on their taxes, too. Doesn't mean they were forced to do it, it just means they didn't know any better.
And also, it's a bit suspect to constantly lose your job to "slightly" less-qualified "protected-class" minorities, wouldn't you say? It's not as if IT was overrun with Mexicans and Blacks, sucking all the jobs away. And in the majority of hiring situations, it's typical that there is one prospect who is much more qualified than the rest. It's usually not true that there's a photo finish.
I have to side with the parent on this one. I work in HR and we get emails from the corporate office each month outlining the "type" of person we are looking for. It isn't only race related, but also gender. For example, this month we are low on minority females. So even if a black male applies and is more qualified than say a latino female...
I'm sure there are people that are angry with this or don't believe it. I gotta do what I gotta do, or I could be on ther side of the interview table. The corporation I work for is very frightened of EOE type lawsuits and they DO put up with under-producing people that aren't white male. To the point where it hurts our bottom line, but I guess its cheaper than a lawsuit.
Everyone has a little bit of it. Some are full of it.
Looking for discrimination against white men?
When I ran my own business, I hired people I could trust -- friends of the boss, people I went to college with, people with connections -- of whatever color or gender. So tell me again why I am incorrect to explain my own actions? And some people see racism where there isn't any.Check out how universities recruit and promote tenure track professors. You can be the most qualified and experienced chemist in the world, but no matter how many doctorates you have, if you are a white male good luck finding a position as an Associate Professor anywhere in the USA. Usually the second paragraph of every posting will read "Minorities and women are encouraged to apply.".
There was a guy who I worked with who was fired, when I talked to him later he ranted on and on about the only reason he lost his job was because he was of mixed race, because his grandmother was Haitian.
The truth was everybody from the CEO on down thought this dude was a full-blooded Swede, the company fired him because he came to work stoned (when he bothered showing up at all).
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
If I were being racist in interviewing, or the company in hiring, we'd be unable to meet our customer company demands. To be blunt, to be racist in the current Silicon Valley environment is a detriment to corporate survival, and thus remarkably stupid (in addition to all the anti-social apsects, and their stupidity).
There have been some good comments in the discussion here so far... I liked the mention of accent as a barrier. I think to some degree that's true; it's often harder to understand people whose native languages or cultural exposure to English is further off, if they haven't been in the US for long. But part of my job interviewing people is to get past that and figure out how well they know their technical stuff. It is extremely extremely rare for someone to be so bad at communicating that we can't connect and figure out their technical skills. Their communications skills are another axis we rate them on, and accent can be a factor in that. But we find that most customers are very tolerant of smart people who may have to communicate a bit slower and more carefully. Much more so than of people who aren't fundamentally good experienced IT folks. Communications can work itself out; talent is either there or it isn't.
Based on the people who make it as far as a phone interview, it is apparent that there are uneven distributions of people who are actually in the industry. A lot fewer women, and some minorities are underrepresented (the most uncommon accent in interviews for me is Spanish... which is very strange, in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a huge hispanic population). That's unfortunate; we're misisng out on potential smart employees just because it's not seen as a career by kids in high school and college. Moreso with women than along racial lines (I know more blacks in IT than women). But both are areas where increasing the industry's visibility to potential employees early on would help.
Haha.. u think ur company is like the UN check out mine.
We're all Canadian, just some not born here.
2 Guys born in England
2 Guys born in India
Boss born in Canada, grew up in Europe and the Middle East
2 ppl, 1 girl and 1 guy born in Serbia
1 girl born in the phillipines.
1 Coop kid born in Taiwan
1 girl born in Iran
3 Guys born in Canada (not including the boss)
1 Guy born in Brazil.
But then again, the vancouver area is very very multicultural.
Huh. When you wrote, "I recently had a recruiter tell me that I would have no problem finding a job in the current economy - not because I am enthusastic, well-educated and have good experience - but because I am ....." I assumed the next word was going to be black or hispanic, not white - since there are relatively few of those groups represented in IT (in my experience), I would think that employers would jump at the chance to hire more in the interest of diversity.
Just last year I interviews for a position (I'm a white male). The tech interview was brutal, but i thought I did pretty good.
The next day an indian friend of mine (the interviewer was also indian) interviewed for the same position. We both agreed I had more experience and was better for the job, but only my friend was offered the position. He also said he received nothing but easy questions,and couldn't believe some of the things I had to do on the interview.
I firmly believe there is racism in this industry. Only isn't not the white males that are the only ones being racist.
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
I was contracting in one of the product teams at Microsoft. To my surprise there was not even a single African American or a Hispanic in the team. 70% Caucasians, 10% Chinese, 10% Europeans, 2%Indians and remaining from the rest of the world. Had I contracted in a different team, I could have got hired as a full time employee.
I consider "didn't speak fluent English" to be a perfectly legitimite reason not to hire someone. If there are two candidates with fairly equal qualifications, and one speaks English better than the other, than I would pick the fluent English speaker every time.
... but you are completely correct!
Meh.
A man who wants nothing is invincible
There are only 13% of "African American" people in the US. Historically, significant portion of that population even didn't have access to or didn't have interest in higher education. So there you go. You can realistically expect 5-7% of your IT staff to be black _if_ you only hire Americans. Hiring overseas further dilutes this percentage.
By whose measure were they deemed less qualified (slightly) than yourself?
Correction: it's an attempt to redress CURRENT wrongs. This is the thing that people fail to see. Growing up in the inner city, I've watched the rich white son of a prominent lawyer go from being a straight "D" drugdealer to a prominent lawyer himself. Meanwhile my 4.0 GPA friend who was black, is now in construction. Right NOW a black person trying to earn a job with qualifications equal to that of a white person who comes from a standard upper-middle class family has to work twice as hard to get those qualifications. Racism is embedded in a great deal of American Institutions and it is offset by things like EEOE and Affirmative Action. While these types of programs offset the racism elsewhere, there are still the remaining folks who worked as hard as most upper-middle class white people but didn't get grabbed up by AA or EEOE. The real solution is to remove Racism from our institutions, then we won't need AA and EEOE. But the sad fact is that can never happen as long as a majority of people not on the receiving end pretend there is no such thing as racism in our institutions. They might as well be racist themselves.
"This is a very controversial view"
Your view may be controversial to some, but to others it is dead on target. Jobs should go to the best qualified imho, and other societies have a far greater problem regarding clan type favoritism and prejudice then we do; as you point out.
Here is another view that may be correlated as to why some may feel there is racism in the work place.The display on national news showing nothing but black folks stranded in New Orleans was a shocking. But there were an equal amount of white people that were in the same waters, and suffered the same pain, and alot of them died. Yet the media focused on just the black folks. So, until this focus is presented in a balanced way, the perception of racisim (real or percieved) will never end in America.
The real question that has to be asked is: Why are there less black folks in IT? Could it be that we are conditioned by the media to believe that if a black person fails in a catagory such as IT that its due to racism? Or is it lack of intrest in IT on the part of black folks? Lack of ability? Lack of grades in that area? If i were an IT manager, i would ask these questions first, and if i was not satisfied, then i would investigate my focus on the issue of race.
This has been another valuable and informative opinion from:
Catahoula!
Newspaper accounts? That's like saying if you see it on tv, it must be true. I'm not saying everything in the newspaper is false, but come on.
Eh?
OK, so reports in mainstream newspapers cannot be used to substantiate a claim. Neither can the television news, if I catch your drift. Clearly you live in a very information-restricted universe.
Look at the Businessweek article and tell me if you think it's full of lies.
Same goes for magazines. You can choose to trust them, but I would research the topic first.
The Businessweek article discussed a number of actual court cases using real names of real companies and real plantiffs. Don't you think they would be sued out of existence if they just made it up? As for "research the topic first", well, clearly, you haven't done so.
Bottom line is, the only thing I trust is personal experience, and I don't see this bias towards minorities in the workplace. I do see a bias towards lazy and stupid, which anyone can be.
Well, if you haven't seen it, it must not exist. Newspapers who report such things must have made it up for nefarious purposes (for example, Businessweek makes most of its money selling magazines to people who wish to bring down corporate America.)
I don't doubt some people are discriminated against, the same as I don't doubt minorities get preferencial treatment at some companies. I'm just saying I have yet to see either happening on a scale worth my time to think about during a bowel movement.
You must give a great deal of attention to your bowel. You've spent more than a few minutes trying to claim that the source I used to establish that racism in the workplace exists in a substantial fashion is unreliable.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
I work for a historically black universty, and its amazing how many companies come to recruit our engineers (our engineering program is decent though) mostly because they are looking to fill a quota. The other university in town has a larger engineering dept and more status, but their job fairs don't bring in nearly the caliber of companies that ours do.
I worked on a project back in my undergrad days for a large government agency. At the end of the project, when the administrator was announcing to everyone that they had an opening for an engineer, I was politely told after the announcement that the opening was not for me because I wasn't a minority. I wasn't really interested in their peanuts anyway, but it kinda stuck with me.
I don't think racism is a real issue, in and of itself. Sure, like anything, exceptions exist. But I think the larger issues are such things as language barriers and a tendency for people of some cultural backgrounds to have less day-to-day computer experience.
EG. I recently talked to a buddy who was privy to some info on a recent round of I.T. hiring, and one Asian candidate with good, solid experience on his resume and several industry certifications was turned down in the final round of hiring because he was very difficult for the interviewers to understand. Maybe from his perspective, that is "racism" - but in reality, he simply needed to work on better English speaking skills and he would probably have gotten the job.
If you work in America, or even for an American company, I think an ability to speak clear, fluent English (and write it well too) can be just as important a job requirement as Windows 2003 Server experience or anything else a company might need.
You ask for specific examples, basically anecdotals, yet you don't want "angry bloggers"? WTF is up with the (lack of) logic in that? "Angry bloggers" would be a primary place to FIND specific anecdotal accounts of this or that "bad thing" happening to people. You expect every instance of discrimination to become a six part expose in a national magazine, or perhaps part of an expensive pay per view "peer reviewed" journal article? Dream on. You sure aren't looking for any rational discussion, and you sure don't want to be confused with any evidence either, your mind is made up in advance. WTG promoting true science.
...of the three IT jobs I've had I've worked for two black people (one male and one female) and one white person (female).
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
You misunderstand.
Workplaces that have little or no minority group representation tend to panic and favour minority job-seekers to "improve the balance" so as to be seen as complying with the above act. Sometimes that means overlooking people who might be better suited for the job.
It's not the act itself, but an unintentional but inevitable side-effect.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
And I know a lot more (even if you normalize for population size) whites who like to use their privilege to not have to be afraid of the police, to not get followed around in stores, to get into college because of Daddy's large gift or legacy status, so on and so forth.
Just want to point out the full story...
-bugg
As a brown person, I think discrimination in IT is much less of a problem than it is in other fields. IT people (at least where I live) tend to be fairly liberal - meaning that they have seen, interacted and can deal with brown people. I haven't experienced anything I'd classify as out and out racism. I've been denied a job here and there and wondered why, but you can never really know the hiring manager's reasons. I've run into a very few IT people who are likely racists, but I've never had to work with or for one. As another poster commented, age discrimination is a much bigger problem in IT.
To get ahead in America, you need to play the game. That game is "assimilate". Speak proper English, (optional: without a regional accent, if possible), don't stand out, "conform", stop complaining and get to work!
Disclaimer: I am "some white guy". However, my own family history is a case in point. I have none. I don't have any "culture" other than "American". My ancestors (as recently as grandparents) came from crappy Eastern European countries. They came here to be Americans. They did not want to be hyphenated-americans. Two generations in, nobody in the family speaks Ukranian, or Hungarian or whatever they spoke before we spoke American English.
I think culture is far more important than race. I am more likely to get along with a black man wearing dockers, who speaks standard English than I am with some pierced, tattoed, purple haired white kid with an attitude. But that is just me. And lots of other folks - so deal with it.
Stereo types are fun, but equal opportunity; If I say "Billy Bob lives in a trailer and shops at Wal-Mart" you know what I am talking about just as sure as "Latisha likes her fried chicken and watermelon" or "Let's go see Apu at the quicki-mart" - all are stereotypes. There are just double standards for getting insensed about it. It is ok to make fun of "white-trash", and for now, it is still funny in many quarters to assume Indians run all the hotels and 7-11's in the USA.
When you "lose your culture" what are you giving up? Face it, some cultures suck more than others. Pick one you think you will like, but if you don't pick a "white-bread" American culture, while in America, and then complain that you don't have the success in that culture the problem might not lie where you think.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Whenever I post a job in my small department which part of a large IT organization at a large corporation (I am the manager), I get dozens, if not hundreds, of Indian expatriate resumes and very few other resumes, especially from recruiters. However, I know for a fact that Indian expatriates do not account for more than 10-20% of the IT workforce in the metro-Detroit area. So I am left wondering whether there are more resumes out there because people are more willing to lay off or fire these workers and they are more often on the market or whether there is truly this sharp of an increase in the expatriate population. Also, my view may be skewed by the large number of resumes coming from contract recruiters and maybe expats are more likely to work as contractors. And I definitely agree with the guy who said that accent is the big issue, not race itself. Most IT people have to deal with customers or clients or business people and thick accents are a big challenge in those situations.
Unfortunately, your link is completely non-encompasing. It is a federal REQUIREMENT to have DBE (disadvantage), WBE (women), and/or MBE (minority) content.
Now, there are good DBEs, and bad DBEs. We have inspector DBEs that are great businesses which just happen to be owned by minorities and who'd we use none the less. On the other hand, there are areas in which it's tough to find a good local DBE... but we are required to use one.
There have been situations were we have a DBE, can't get rid of them, and end up paying someone else to do the job. You can apply for exception if you prove that none of the available DBEs are competent... but this is easier said then done.
The sad fact is, if you REQUIRE that government contractors use minority/women businesses you are causing race/sexism. Businesses will do what it takes to make money. These rules make the path of least (and cheapest) resistance to hire contractors that are not necessarily the best, but the most likely to fill the quota.
Recently, quotas have been 'prohibited'. In effect that isn't quite true. If your DBE content is below a (know) level, you need to PROVE that you did everything possible to incorporate DBEs. The effect is tha tthe DBE quota is still aimed at.
Example:
You are hiring a company to make whatcha-ma-things. Three apply, ones a DBE. You felt that one of the non-DBEs had a slightly better product. Normally you'd choose them, but would then have to prove that your decision was 'fair'.
At least, a huge number of them do, especially of the ones who go abroad. Chinese and Russians don't, but it's sad for Indians who have a native grasp of the language to be considered on par with Chinese and Russians as a group in terms of language/communications skills.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Sorry, I worked for a government contractor. It may not be mandated, but we got regularly inspected for our "balance" by the government, and if we were way off it effected our ability to bid future contracts. When hiring, the HR dept would come to me and mention that they were concerned about the department "balance" and how the next hire would effect that. The implication is obvious, though no one would dare say it directly because you couldn't. They were just as worried about reverse descrimination litigation.
Potential loss of future business is practically blackmailing some businesses into removing whole classes of potential workers from each job. Been there, seen it.
-G "We love to buy books, because we are buying the belief we have time to read them" - Warren Zevon
You're not hired if you're not an extraterrestrial!
The french (along with the rest of Europe) might finally start to figure out that it IS necessary to identify and promote awareness/acceptance of minorities, rather than sweeping it under the rug and pretending the problem doesn't exist.
Affirmative Action programs aren't perfect but they raise awareness and I think the are good as long as they aren't allowed to stick around too long after they have achieved the goals they are intended for. I think in the progressive states in the US (like CA) where we've had these types of programs for a while, it is starting to get to the point where we don't need them anymore and the cons are starting to outweigh the pros. We aren't there yet but we are getting close, maybe another 10 years or so and they won't be necessary here in CA. Recently, it seems like they are only becoming effective for creating stupid lawsuits and protecting certain lazy/greedy individuals lucky enough to be born as part of a minority population. Then again, as of 2000 there is no majority in CA anymore!
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
There is no damn racism in IT!! There is just racism period!! One day racism is gonna be an option on your favorite restaurant's menu.
-**- Racism Over Easy - $7.99
You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So what that make you? Good?
Same goes for magazines. You can choose to trust them, but I would research the topic first.
So how would you start researching the topic, then?
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Usually, if you're talking to someone in a call center who doesn't give a last name, they're a zero.
I think they just have their cause/effect mixed up. The IT industry is mostly white males because the highest percentage of computer geeks are white males. Go to convention or D&D games, it's pretty obvious. I'm not saying there aren't black and/or female geeks, just that they're a lower percentage. Look at statistics from colleges about CS majors. Just the way it is.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
IT job pre-requisites
- effective communication skills both spoken work and written
- prior job experience skills
- college degree - usually computer science, EE, or other engineering
- professional behavior and attitude dealing with employers, recruiters, and possible employers
- common courtesy and overall politeness
- humility
Comparing the general population demographic background to a company's employee base is inherently flawed and breaks down completly when adjusting the possible employee population to include only those that have a computer science, EE, or other engineering degree. In other words, if you drop out of high school, or are in jail, it's almost certain you won't get an IT job.
Lack of communication skills, common courtesy and professional behavior will prevent you from getting an IT job. For example, failing to interview in acceptable business clothing will almost always prevent you from obtaining a job (unless you are interviewing at an organization where wearing an interview suit is looked down on (e.g., an art school's IT shop)).
Well, it's pretty obvious he's trying to turn this around and call the guy a racist. Unfortunately, it's come to the point in this country when topics like this come up that if you don't agree with one side, they turn around and accuse you of being a racist.
The only good thing about this is that sooner or later people who do this end up on the receiving end of an accusation like that, and then it becomes crystal clear who frequently that term gets thrown around.
Anyone else find it curious how a lot of the comments here are infact racist themselvs?
"Oh it's not true, we have X asians, X black, X Green people and Y purple in our office
BTW I'm white!"
Well maybe you should stop going "we have X Y and Z people in our office" and instead go "we have a mix of different people, but as long as they do the job looks and skin colour is just there to tell who someone is" and stop seperating people into groups?
I like muppets.
our company is in a hiring freeze... *except* we can hire "diversity" candidates. we hired 2 minorities and are interviewing more. we are not allowed to hire non-diversity.
i work in a successful fortune500 company so this is no small-time business.
i am so sick of hearing about how minorities get the shaft... everyone gets the shaft, and that is life. stop and complaining and deal with it.
KILL WHITEY
with such colorful language...
takes alot of hypocrasy to cry racism when people dont want you around.
I am an Asian female graduating in MIS (laugh at me, I know, this comment made yesterday made me laugh) this coming spring. I'm currently looking for a job upon graduation. Does being both a female, a person of a minority race with little real life experience make a difficult job search for me? No, I really don't want to be just managing/outsourcing people for a job. (I mean, I like to fool around on my computers, one running XP and the other a Ubuntu server, some web programming, reading /. and all that . . .)
Compared to other countries I've worked in I found the USA to be pretty balanced. Now I worked for 11 years in the IT field inNew York City (which I know if not very representative of the USA) and had 7 direct bosses. Of the 7, three were female (1 was white, 1 was asian and 1 was black) and of the 4 who were male all were white. However of my direct peers there was always a mix of races and genders.
Oh, when I am referring to 'male/female' I am referring to how they identified themselves, not necessarily their biological sex which is something I have no knowledge of.
Seems the issue is more high up the ladder. By the time you get to the VP level it's almost all old white guys running the show.
Peace, or Not?
In my observations, it's actually easier to get hired in IT at low levels if you're not a white male. On the other hand, it's harder to get into management if you aren't, especially if you aren't American born.
From my (white male) perspective, I've also found this tends to make the (white male) management think less of you if you're a white male and not interested in being in management...
on IRC [efnet] filled with nothing but racists fsckers. They call it #windows2000. Freely expressed racist behaviour is well accepted there. People like Goad and Digerati are always ready to start the race bashing. Stop by and say hello.
Just wanted to share that with you.
You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So what that make you? Good?
We have a very diverse group of people where I work. We select people based on their skillset and experience. That being said, we have found that we've had a very disproportionate number of applicants who are not native english speakers. Unfortunately, we've found this to be a very large issue when attempting to put together a project or explain a task. Many of our non-english speakers have a lot of trouble understanding what is being put forth, even though they do understand english. We've found this to cause productivity to fall through the floor, and frustration levels to run high!
We're at this point attempting to find either native english speakers, or very gluent english speakers to fill 2 developer positions. This has proven to be difficult, but we are trying to hold out for this for in order to improve our workflow and work experience.
This is my Sig.
Well, given this argument, how can someone make the reverse accusation? How can they prove that they weren't hired because of their race? Because they didn't have "enough" people working for them that were yellow/brown/white?
I worked at a major university some time back. We hired a LOT of people over the years in the department I worked for. Of the over 500 people in the organization, I can think of three people that were black, and one of them transfered from another part of the university. One was a secretary, and two were in upper management. In all the hiring I saw done, in over 12 years, I never, not a single time, did I see a black candidate interviewed. Not once. We interviewed (and hired) every race and creed, I never saw a black candidate. There was a distinct effort on the part of the University's EEO to find candidates, but they were never successful. And this was at a public university!
You poor, poor white guy...
It depends on the company you work for. I work for IBM in Toronto, and let me tell you, there is no racism in this building. A majority of the employees are non-caucasion, and they are all hired because they have necessary talent and skills.
If you walk into human resources dressed like Flavor-Flave then don't expect to get hired!
It took us about 160 years to finally beat segregation and your telling me we have solved our problems in just 40 years?! This is absurd, of course there is racism in jobs, its all over the place. We have made great strides, but we are not even close to being completely racist free.
Bottom line is, the only thing I trust is personal experience, and I don't see this bias towards minorities in the workplace.
And yet anecdotal observations filtered through selective perception is one of the weakest forms of evidence. Not only that but you assume that a random sampling group of one is somehow satisfactory.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
The other day I wondered why we have have had *no* African-American candidates. Maybe somebody can shed some light on this. I have assumptions, but I'm not sure if they're true.
Another item which plays a huge role in hiring is whether or not the candidate can communicate well. I've run into candidates who can progam three of us into the floor, but if there's a communication gap, it just doesn't work out in our setting, in the longrun, because we're a small company and do not have super-specific roles. Whoever we hire will be dealing with clients either over the phone or at meetings once in a while, will be involved in the planning and analysis parts of the project and must be able to express abstract though well. From experience we do not hire a person anymore if there is a communication gap. It inevitable ends up that we replace the person and it's not good for them or us. This isn't prejudice or racism, but a problem that can be overcome no matter the origin of the person.
I will say that you sound like you are making an effort, but in the end, you are still a racist. I would never even imagine stating my race to a prospective employer. You assume that YOU are discriminated against, but discrimination goes every direction. There are very few companies that have official policies against discrimination, with the exceptions of caucasions. Apparently you are not human, because Japanese are human, and you clearly don't consider her to be one of "your" people. I would certainly consider her one of MY people. Unless you mean racists by "your people". Really, you might find life a lot easier if you considered everyone to be "Your People". I know that I don't care what color a person is, but as soon as I hear someone seperating people by their race, I do my best to just avoid them in the future. That is both personally, and professionally.
The most blatant example I've seen of this was when we were hiring in the middle of the dotcom bubble. We needed another body, so we called a few recruiters.
We got some people we liked, but they were all hideously expensive, so we called back and asked for some that didn't cost quite so much.
The next batch of people were all female, black and hispanic. I kid you not.
I thought one of the black guys would be really good; he had a lot of energy and was able to talk with me very well on a technical level. I suggested we hire him. They ignored my advice and hired a (white) lady instead that I thought was much less-qualified. She turned out to be as junior as I thought.
Fortunately, she also worked like crazy, and ended up being a great addition. By now, she may be fairly senior if she stayed with it. So it wasn't a BAD hiring decision by any means, but I thought at the time, and I still think now, that the black guy didn't get the job because of his skin color.
That last part is just a hypothesis, mind you. Nobody ever SAID anything... but when I asked why we weren't giving him the offer, nobody ever gave me a hard reason. There may have been things going on that I didn't know about, but skin color seems a likely explanation.
But asking for 'cheaper people' and getting all women and minorities.... jesus, that was BLATANT. And I especially found it troubling that nobody seemed to even notice.
You want to know something scary? My girlfriend and her friends just completed applications to medical school. Her black friends claimed they could get into good med schools with an MCAT score of about 23-25. Compare this with the 29-30 necessary for an Asian or white student to gain admission. This means that you will one day be operated upon (provided the lower scorers do not fail out of med school) by someone with an admissions score approximately 20% lower than the average med school student!
:(
And before I get misinterpreted: I am not asserting anything racial. I am merely worried that I will be operated upon by an inferior doctor because of lax admissions standards for them (which is a failing of the state, not of me). Of course they will still have passed the certifications and so forth, but still -- they showed 20% less promise than some who were rejected! Think how good the rejected people might perform comparatively.
We're mostly caucasian and asian where I work. (Aust. Gov't. Dept.)
There's no conscious policy, but selection is based on merit, and in western society, inequal opportunity means that those with social advantages (money, role models in family and peers, contacts, home location, etc) are able to better maximise the value they offer to employers.
So racism is the wrong way to be trying to explain this, in most cases. Social inequality is the real issue; I don't feel there's been a lot of progress in that area.
Wikipedia maybe? :p
I'm a Book
On the Bookshelf
I tested exceptionally well in my youth. I've been accused of faking test results, of grand improbable conspiracies, and of outright lying, throughout my life, due simply to high IQ scores and strong, immediate competence. In my field I often encounter scenarios exactly like the one you describe. Hell, in everyday life I encounter scenarios of great similarity. They ask, I explain, they bullshit, I counter, they leave. I worked in retail -- consumer tech sales, mostly. (Running two registers implies an interesting physical layout of your store.) I've put sales numbers through the roof. You're right; it is psychology. Which is something that can be grasped and understood. Numbers through the roof, et al. People don't listen to me; I encounter almost exactly the same discrimination you describe. People react very, very poorly when I am right. I branch out of my field to help people with questions; but invariably they discriminate against me, once proven being correct. I am white.
There have been some interesting comments on this story. I think some of them make some interesting points about people preferring familiar voices or faces, but in my experience, the biggest factor for discrimination in Australia at least, is culture.
Over here we have a "multicultural society". This means that after trying to keep our culture relatively "pure" (well that's how they used to think) at the beginning of last century, we have decided to encourage immigrants to retain the best of their parent culture, so we can all learn from each other.
So when we meet different looking people in the street or in the workplace, there's also the understanding that they come from a different cultural background.
A friend of mine manages a small group and periodically has to hire people to join his group. He is interested in "what they know", but in his field that information goes out of date very quickly, so he's even more interested in the sort of person the applicant is. Does the person have a positive attitude, self-motivation to study, a dedication to excellence and constant self-improvement? How does this person fit into my corporate culture?
Australia is mostly European, with a variety of countries of origin. So is my friend's group. We have a growing population of Asians. My friend has often hired Asian staff, and some of them have been great! But for some reason, the Indians he's hired have never worked out. Perhaps the way that their culture expresses authority and respect is so wildly different that his management is ineffective.
In the same way, it's hard to say he's sexist. He's never hired a woman, for the simple reason that none have ever applied. But he has also never managed to scout female staff, possibly because (my tentative observation as a woman) he does not understand the way women express their intelligence and ambition.
My friend is not racist or sexist. He is simply being a good manager and focusing on the culture within his group. So perhaps the next step for equal opportunity is to encourage research into and development of corporate culture guidelines that offset these differences, allowing employers to focus on adaptability, intelligence and ambition, rather than personality and style.
Therein lies one of the problems that some black people feel when they are in the workforce. Some wonder if they are only there because the hiring company needed to fill a quota, which completely negates all the hard work that they did.
It probably happens more than you think.
Long before the interview, the discrimination against foreigners starts with the resume. It's unfortunate, but having a more Americanized name helps a lot or rather doesn't hinder as much. I'm sure 95% of the time if you take a qualified person's resume and you submit it twice for the same job but have two names, one americanized and one more foreign, you'll find that the americanized name gets called for an interview.
That is all I want to say on the subject really, "no". No recism at a macro level.
I've always had an issue with using the phrase "making progress" with regards to accusations of racism. There is no progress to be made if there is no racism. What big company these days doesn't have a diversity department? Its ridiculous, really. WHO CARES... Hire technically qualified people, irrespective of their sex, race or sexual orientation. What do those have to do with how well you can do your job? Are males better at math and therefore generally more suited to some IT jobs? Perhaps. I at least entertain the possibility. Does that mean I'm not going to hire a woman? Of course not! I just want to run my business! Along the same lines, is it possible that black people on average do not acheive the same level of education as other groups? Sure, it is possible. Will I not hire a black person based on an assumption they are stupid? No, I'll give them an interview just like I would anyone else. I will hire based on MERIT.On a slightly related topic, I heard just today a story from someone who works at FedEx. This guy wanted to have Spring Break off this year. He was told no. He has seniority. He has taken this period of time off before. Why was he told no? I (more or less) quote:
Now that's political correctness and racism at its worst. When the fear of accusations of racism, even where truly, none is present, forces you to make certain business decisions, that is just wrong.Which is bullshit because I'm white, middle class and guess what if I fuck up the cops still come down on me hard, I DO get followed around in most stores I shop at especially when I goto the store down the street that is owned and operated by blacks and carries suits and such. I go there because my dad likes their hats btw. I did NOT get into college because of my parents and have recieved absolutely zero help from them. All you are doing is making the whole situation worse by responding to stereotypes with more stereotypes of your own.
My IQ was rated at about 190 when I was 12
I've compiled a list of websites that you may want to spend more time on than slashdot:
http://www.mensa.org/
http://www.cerebrals.com/
http://www.smartgroups.com/
http://www.iqsociety.org/
You may feel more at home there ^_^
*dons flaimsuit*
I've worked in IT, and because I can calculate multi-dimensional state tables in my head I can sometimes out route a router.
Give me a god damn break. If you experience a lot of friction dealing with other people in your professional life, it's because of crap like this stemming from your obviously overblown ego.
...to get into college because of Daddy's large gift or legacy status, so on and so forth.
I put myself through college, ass hole. With affirmative action, "minorities" got my place in my preferred college because of their fuckin quota.
I am a white male with a fairly high IQ (although not as high as yours by any means). I have encountered many scenarios similar to what you have described. In my case, I have attributed it to my age. 40-something managers and salespeople don't like having a 20-something (at the time) technician tell them what's what. I think it is possible that much of what you attribute to racism might be as easily attributed to ego. My two cents worth... keep the change.
Although we do not have much of an african american population in vancouver, in canada I do not believe this is an issue. Actually at every job I have ever held, the white man is the minority, with usually asians as the majority (all asians count). At my current job there is 3 white developers, and about 5 of color in my development team, and the other dev teams are even more multi-cultural.
I think the moral of the story is if you deal with to much racism in the states, move to canada and you'll have a good chance of getting a job based on your actual qualifications instead of your skin color.
Through what test was your IQ determined? If you were that involved with a child psychologist, GC or therapist, surely you could have been relieved of your abusive household. Sorry, It just sounds a bit too much like pounding a pedestal as an excuse to brag about yourself. I guess I could have a hair trigger due to hearing the same thing every day from people on the internet and realizing what exactly goes into getting such an extremely high score.
I live in MN, and even though I'm caucasian, I don't really see any issues with racism in IT.
But, one thing that I have noticed is that THIS IS MN. Most people here are white. If anything, it's probably easier to get a job here if you're not white. This is because many organizations are struggling to meet their affirmative action requirements. At a previous job, their online application asked your heritage, and if you were not a whitey, you automatically got an interview.
More than half the battle in IT is just getting an interview, so this worked out quite well for a lot of people. The company even resorted to posting job ads in the south in order to get more people of color in to meet their requirements. So, your recruiter's statement that it would be easy for you to get a job because you're white baffles me. Why would he say that anyway? Sounds like he is a prick.
Anyway, with all of the different people I've worked with, I haven't seen any racism. I'm sure if you're the one who's a victim, it's more obvious. I have seen the race card pulled a couple of times when people got fired, but all 3 times it was without merit. One guy slept 4 hours a day at work, and the other two were email admins and were taking confidential company emails from the execs (relating to a huge lawsuit) and sending off to a third party. The FBI hauled them off.
Every area of the country is different though. It's hard to say. But, of the geeky IT people I know, they just don't care about people's differences, they care about ability.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
If your IQ is still 190, the chances are you aren't going to fit in... whatever your skin colour.
There were no blacks regardless of sex in any of my CS classes in a state university. There were only 3 women in my CS classes. I'd say 98% of the CS students were white. In almost all of my other classes, the race/sex mixture reflected the student population. Math classes were the closest race/sex ratio to CS.
I knew more guys taking Nursing than blacks or women taking CS.
No racism, just the facts from my school experience.
So what does this say about the distribution of talent between races?
It means that the probability that someone in IT of a given race is either smart or dumb -- given no other information about them -- is neither 0 nor is it 1!
Thank you Martin Luther King, Jr. for leading me see this profound truth.
Seastead this.
The fact is white skin carries privileges with it in the united states. Does that mean every person who is white has everything easy? No. It would be stupid for me to say that every white person had "XYZ" in common (for all non-trivial statements) but that's not what I said: I said I knew many more whites who profit from white privilege than minorities who abuse what the original poster might refer to as "minority privilege" - an idea that I think is ridiculous.
Does it mean you're less likely to have a cop bust you and a jail send you to prison for the rest of your days? You bet. Just look at how sentencing guidelines are applied, or the death penalty, or the laws against crack versus the laws against cocaine.
-bugg
This is largely the result of Oregon having enough jobs, just too many people.
Help us build a better map!
Uh......you're completely wrong.
The last two organizations I worked for had publicly stated minority hiring goals and practices. Non-minorities sometimes DO lose out in the coprporate rush to appear enlightened and minority friendly.
When I was in the military, the Government even had to publish racial statistics concerning yearly promotions. Certain percentages of minorities MUST get promoted. The biggest joke was that you were certain to advance if you were a female American-Indian.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
sdedeo replied:
And how recently were those tenured professors hired?Sure, older tenured professors are white males and will keep their job until they retire. But when the university goes to replace or add professors, then the discrimination kicks in.
When I was in college, I had a friend who was an assistant professor of chemistry, experienced and well-liked. A professorship opened up, and he applied, but was never offered the position. Instead, the university kept the position open for nearly two years, interviewing several dozen applicants, none of whom were white males. My friend, like many recently graduated chemistry doctorates, never did find a position teaching chemistry.
This is a common situation in American universities -- the old-school tenured professors are all aging white males, so when a position opens up, the school feels that they must fill the job with a minority or female.
Cronyism is not automatically racist.sdedeo quoted me out of context as saying:
and then sdedoe added:
Except nobody at the office had any idea he was anything but Swedish.At best it is strange to quote me out of context to imply that I was saying racism does not exist. My statement was in the context that, somebody who thinks of all their experiences in terms of race, may see everything as being racist.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
As far as personal experience goes, have you ever taken a statistics class? You cannot extrapolate about a given population based on one data point...
A man who wants nothing is invincible
Most racism is against white people these days. As a life long resident of Lousianna, I can say that with no doubt.
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
I taught a programming class once at a small community college. I made friends with some of the students, including one who had a master's degree going back to school to get into IT for the money. We got on the subject of race once. He informed me that black people can't be racist. I'm pretty sure he meant black Americans, but it could have been a genetic thing. I wish I still had his email address, so I could send him a link to your post. Unless, of course, by "my people" you meant your family, or your tight social circle, or your employees, or some other group that you self-identify with for non-racist reasons.
/. makes a lame effort to remember the day of such a great man, I would encourage you to examine MLK's message; examine your heart; and maybe identify yourself as a child of God first, and a brilliant black one second.
If I may use your venacular for a moment and borrow from an old aphorism, a people can be judged by its greatest citizens. As
I cannot say every company has racial discrimination in IT hiring process (at least my previous employers DON'T HAVE DISCRIMINATION), but then I was treated / looked at differently in some companies I interviewed because I am not acaucasian. I am not going to disclose names, but the IT managers in those companies know it themselves.
Ok. Here's one. I don't know too much about insidehighered.com, but I doubt it's a front for the aryan brotherhood.
/., so RTFA is right out. ;->), white female candidate was one of the finalists for a job. Employer's EOO ADDED a male african-american candidate to the finalist pool. White female came in second from the top[1], while african-american came in second from the bottom. University gave the job to the african-american "candidate". Here's a link [pdf, you've been warned] to the decision by the seventh circuit to allow the case to proceed. So does she sound like she qualifies as "one good man or woman"?
:-P) that the number is between 1% and 2% (If it were under 1%, I would have expected the site to say so), it appears that there are between 910 and 1819 [less than 2%, after all ;->] reverse discrimination claims working thier way through the EEOC at the moment.
/me dons asbestos suit.
In summary (because this is
Then there is the case of University of California Regents v Bakke[2]. Where it was held that the UC system had discriminated against a white applicant by admitting lesser-qualified minority applicants. Yeah, that's academic reverse discrimination as opposed to employment. And it was back in the 70's so it's completely irrelevant... Except that the exact same issue came before SCOTUS again in 1996. Unless you think PBS is an angry blogger. There have been a host of similar decisions handed down over the last few years, btw.
In a more general way, this site [3] points out in #12, that "less than 2 percent of the 91,000 employment discrimination cases pending before the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission are reverse discrimination cases." Working on the assumption (because I'm too lazy to mine for the actual numbers
I don't really have a dog in the fight, and to the best of my knowledge have never been passed over for a job based on either my race or my gender. Nor do I know anyone IRL who has claimed to have been so discriminated against. But you asked for proof of "even one" example. While implying that such was a high burden. Btw, google is your friend.
A now await the flames and downmods.
[1] I'm personally curious where #1 fits into all this, but that's another issue.
[2] I don't think that Findlaw counts as an angry blogger-especially as it is just the literal SCOTUS decision.
[3] Which appears to be dismissive of the idea of reverse discrimination, btw.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
Granted, this was 13 years ago, but back in the days when I was involved in recruiting for my company (a large high-tech firm), we went through strict training to guarantee that race was NOT an issue in our recruiting. While we did not have any racial quotas to fill, we were urged to impartially evaluate everyone.
Full disclosure: I'm a WASP.
Now, to my personal experiences as a recruiter on college campuses:
1) The whites had spent too much time partying and were generally underskilled.
2) The blacks openly expressed that they would not accept an entry level programmer job. It was either technical management or product line management, or they were not interested.
3) The asians and the Indians were motivated and had plenty of extracurricular experience (either that, or they were lying through their teeth. I never did know, since I was not the hiring manager.)
We really tried to give preference to US citizens, because the whole green card H1-B thing is a major pain to deal with. But in the end, we had to go with the people that appeared to have the skills, the drive, and the willingness to do the technical jobs that were available.
Later (about 6 years ago), I was again recruiting at various job fairs. This time, the people were a mixture of folks looking for better jobs, or non-citizens looking for someone to sponsor their stay in the US. The citizens looking for better jobs were still underqualified, and the non-citizens were almost uniformly F-1 visas trying to convert to green card or H-1B. We found very few satisfactory candidates from that round.
If companies are "scared shitless" they will be sued by their minority workers, those same workers are scared that they will be viewed as slackers or as "affirmative action" hires that aren't expected to be as good as their white coworkers.
I've worked for a number of large and small technical companies over the course of a 20 year IT career. I've worked in three different U.S. states. In almost all cases I was the only black employee, or the only black technical employee. I always felt that I had to be twice as good as my white coworkers just to break even in the eyes of my managers. In one case I had a manager that was so incompetent I had to do his job and mine. Everyone knew this was going on, including more senior managers. Eventually this guy was let go, but I was never considered as a candidate to be his replacement. I can't say whether or not that was due to racism. No one can.
The thing about racism is that it's often very subtle and difficult to prove. For every lawsuit you read about there are a thousand indignities that go unchallenged. We all like to believe we're enlightened, and I doubt if very many people in tech think of themselves as racist. Frankly, I think the charge of racism is leveled too often in American society, and reasonable people are losing the sense of outrage that charge *should* instill in them.
Employers are very good at stating their anti-discrimination policies and for the most part (I believe) they live up to them. But they're still liable for not policing their employees if a "racist event" occurs. The burden of proof in EEOC cases still falls to the victim to document a pattern and practice of discrimination for them to have a chance at winning. It's a measure of how far we've come that *most* challenges (I believe) are not upheld.
And for the record, I personally have never sued anyone.
I hate to say it but I would guess most of the time it's not because you're black, it's because you're in technology. This describes almost every day of my life and I'm white. Take this website for example, someone makes a deep and insightful comment about quantum physics that actually advances our collective understanding, and three people will make comments that add no value but correct him on little details. "No fair, you got to be the smart guy today! That's my job!" I think it's a characteristic of the profession more than racial bias.
I admit up front, I have a name that is foreign. You wouldn't be able to put your finger on it, but it's Middle Eastern in origin. Point of fact, is that my parents are Pakistani, and that's where my name comes from.
I was fortunate enough to land a job last year thru a friend of a friend -- and it's worked out great. I am well respected, well treated, reasonably well paid (but we'd all like some more, wouldn't we?), and people know the quality of my work not based on my skin color (which by the way, is brown) but the delivery of my work.
After I got hired for this position, I still had the automated emails coming back to me from the CareerBuilders, HotJobs, Monster etc.. So for my own experiment I changed the name on my resume to read William Johannsen (or something to that effect.. very "white") and left everythign else identical and changed the email to something else so I wouldn't spam up my inbox.
It's amazing how many more emails I recieved. At first, I thought it may have been a fluke, so I sent to jobs I prior applied to under my real name and got denied or got no response. I got responses from them as well. Granted, not everybody sent a response and I don't want to give the illusion that everybody is racist or whatever.... but seeing is believing. If I changed my name to John Smith or whatever tomorrow, I believe opportunities would be far greater than if I stuck with my real name.
Is this a 'scientific' experiment? Not in the slightest... it was to satisfy my curiousity and I did it for only a month because I grew bored of doing it knowing that I wouldn't accept any of the jobs, even though some of them were decent. It just didnt make sense since I had already started to build a niche where I was.
I should note, that on the bottom on my resume with my real name, I'd put US CITIZEN on it, because my name tends probably to associate more with people who need H1 Visas or something that come from India or wherever... and I'm sure this is a distraction to a lot of employers who are not willing to sponsor somebody.
Either way... those are the depressing results of my small non-scientific experiment. You can take away from it what you will, but under my own view, I really do think chances improve if you have a white name.. I'm sure a white face only helps further but obviously I can't find any information to the contrary on that.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Right, I think the point is that people are prejudice, but it has lots to do with the fundamental attribution error type of self confidence.
People generally don't think that they're wrong. Sometimes they'll say they're wrong just to be nice, but they don't always think it. This is no different from yourself, except that you find it necessary to constantly prove to everyone. You've so far suggested that you've been always right.
I do say that it sounds like you're having a bit of an ego thing going on. That just puts people off to begin with. Dr. Phil covered this in an episode. He said people want to be valued. Every run of the apprentice they have someone like Omarosa telling everyone how jealous everyone is of them.
I had an Indian boss one time, and I was an awkward shy nerdy type around then, and I aced this test, and he insisted that I cheated, but I didn't. I don't know if it was anything racial, but he just didn't want to believe. I think it's more of how I presented myself, as shy and incompetent.
But it's very easy to just presume that it was racism, but how do you really know unless they come out and say it? How do you know you're not just projecting?
Now let's see the genius at work?
At a company I used to work at, the HR department would get giddy and excited whenever a black guy would apply, regardless of qualifications, because the company (a military contractor) was almost all white and they wanted to present a 'diversified' image.
Which is why the software engineers had to do both the software engineering AND the IT for the company for the next two years, while the "What is Ethernet?" IT guy was featured prominently on company brochures. I actually think the Onion had a satirical article like this a while back.
Remember, kids, just because someone was a Marine, doesn't mean they know how to sysadmin a UNIX box.
I don't think that this is what MLK had in mind when he was having a dream for the future.
We should move away from Affirmitive Action and toward a colorblind society.
I dont care what color your skin is. What I do care about is whether or not you have half a fucking brain and a good dose of common sense. If you lack these qualities maybe consider a career in accounting or marketing...
Unless someone at the company is dumb enough to say "No Irish/Blacks/Indians/Koreans/Whatever Need Apply", one person can't prove it.
It takes a thorough review of hiring records, or better yet a deliberate investigation where matched sets of applicants with near-identical credentials (or actors playing such applicants) are sent in; if they always offer the white guy the job, there's a problem.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Informative perspective. It sounds like your problem could be more running into people that are biggots. Just because a company as a whole doesn't practice biggotry doesn't mean the employees don't (and vice-versa). African Americans seem to be a rarity in IT/Computer Science though. I go to a *IT (Pretty selective, but not anywhere near Ivy-League selective) university on the outskirts of a city that is predominitaly black (with some education problems from what the news says). Yet, I've seen very few black people in the CS building (many caucasians, indians and some asians). It seems like either not many black people go into CS related fields, or there is a "selective" kink in college admissions (to put it nicely). I do agree with your views on the media. I came from a town that had very distorted views on many things because there were no minorities, and the only exposure many have had to people of different ethnicities was what they saw on TV. What can you do though (other then leave as I did)........
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Oooh I've been waiting for this opportunity!
:)
Let me present myself, I'm a Moon Jelly (Aurelia aurita) by the name of Bob(ette) Randolphson. Don't let my first name Bob(ette) confuse you as we aurelias are sometimes male sometimes female and sometimes asexual.
Now I don't have much experience running a server but as you can see I'm posting at slashdot (and rather proud of it actually) and I'm sure that as long as I don't have to do the physical bits I would quickly get cozy with the CLI if given a suitable aquarium.
I'm slightly bluish depending on the light and look forward to making your working environment a bit more colorful than it already is. Please note my excellent grasp of the english language and if a mold can run your server I bet I can too!
Will work for plankton, looking forward to the interview
Detailed background information can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Jelly
p.s. damn I should have logged in to post this lol
In addition, some companies on their own choose to resort to a quota-like system out of laziness or incomplete understanding of the law.
And some companies decide to avoid the costs of litigation, (which are high, even if they're right), which can ensue on the pretext that if the demographics of their workforce don't match the demographics of their community, that they must be practicing illegal discrimination.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I am a CTO of a Chicago based VC firm. I hire contractors and full time employees. I don't even look at the color of their skin. Rather, I ask potential candidates specific questions, and it becomes apparent within minutes if the person is BSing or if this person is serious. The second step is attitude. Most of the issues I have stem from people not really caring. Folks leaving at 5PM. Some schedule 'cowboy' upgrades at 3PM hoping systems come up and no one notices. There are also those that want to prove themselves and screw things up. Most of these issues come from younger crowd, or the self taught hackers - come to think of it, I hired a top notch Linux guy that was so confident in himself, he would just do the craziest stuff. He figured out how to make all clients think they are still connected to a Windows Exchange server by spoofing and looping some code (on a linux box) - then he would reboot the exchange server and no one would even know it was down. He is a black kid from South Africa (20 ish) and probably the best contractor I have right now. Race never plays a part in my hiring practices.
Intelligent Design
OK I think you will going to maybe don't like it because I think almost every American people who have seen South Korean people with a black people thinks South Korean people don't like Black American people. And I'm a Korean.
e d cultural system. I'm very scared to say it but it is just every day normal thing to some country. And don't think that they all do is some hate and making fun of other people by De-Valueing other people. They even fight every single day and hurt everyone they meet!
You didn't think Korean or Japanese are that kind of freak? That's because they are already changed themselves to fit you. Because they maybe respected you even if they don't know how to repect you they tried and maybe failed.
I did not overblown anything about this japanese/korean/even chinese culture. We all are bad people compared to you american people if you see it in American Terms because we don't do things as American people does. We Korean call our Korean friend mo**** fu**** sh**ty s**t. And what are you gonna do if I say it is one way to express a friendship?
Now, you can just mod me as a racist.
Racism starts from the self-centered-view. And I think most of the people in the world still does that, and I think even the so called Anti-Rasists, also, does that.
I saw an american black guy seeing me like a some kind of freak at the Home Depot because I did not RESPECTed him in his way. When he asked me if I need a help for finding Home Depot product, I said no with: I did not looked into his eye and I was somewhat being defensive when I'm saying No. And he gave me "....Ohhh Kay.... Ohhh Kay..." feeling. Oh god. I understand that feeling. You give me that feeling when you think I am a racist.
But wait a minute. We Korean people are, at the first place, defensive to everything. We Korean people are, at the first place, do not stare into someone's eye unless you want to fight one.
Oh christ, we Korean people never do the Respect in the way American people does because it is not just what Korean people do. It's not because you are a black but it is because of what we are, we have totally different emotional/cultural/expression-of-emotion system and it has nothing to do with other *cultural* bases.
Of course some of so called Old-Aged-Extremely-Uneducated-Korean-People don't like black or white or hispanic or jewish or anyone other than their own town's people. Just like they don't like people from *our next town*.
In many other cultural bases' view, especially "nice and cool based cultural system guys" and "nice and cool and respect-based cultural system guys" will think we Koreans are something like a Haters or something.
Maybe. Compared to other "Good, Cool, Well-Respecting" people.
But we have another respecting system for that. We have another it's OK and cool system for that. We have another *that's nice* system for that.
I don't think it is a Racial problem, it's rather cultural problem.
Some people want to be RESPECTED in some way, but some people like that in Other Way.
Some people want to be Loved in some way, but some people don't do that in that way.
Now, from what you have described, I think that is just SO NORMAL JAPANESE!!!
They do that to their own people things like making bullshit of your RIGHT CHOICE. I mean, if they do that to their own people, why not to the Black American???? If they don't do that especially to the Black American, they ARE the racist but if they treat you just like they treat the japanese, I don't think they are. And you say they are a racist because they did not respected you in YOUR way? Did you ever respected THEM in THEIR WAY? Maybe they are just a racist and you are an innocent well succeeded from the hell Cinderalla Man. You got to know that, there are a LOT of country that has Hate/Sadness/Defensive/Bullying/MakingFunOfIt-bas
You're an idiot. White privelege? Give me a break. College admission, two prospective students. One is white, one is black. Black prospect happens to be the son of Michael Jordan. White prospect is son of poor West Virginia coal miner. Grades are the same. Extra curricular activities, the same. Only one slot available. Who gets in? The black student. Why? Because he's black.
At the University of Michigan, a perfect SAT score is worth 12 points, being a minority, 20 points. Being white, 0 points.
After you get out of college, in the corporate world, that black job candidate will have a substantial advantage over his white counterpart. Why? Because of the threat of EEOC lawsuits, qualified black candidates are in a very high demand. If you don't have a "correct" ratio, you run a very significant risk of discrimination lawsuits. No one ever gets sued for not hiring a white male.
Whites have less to fear from police because they commit crimes at much lower rates than blacks, especially violent crimes (blacks commit 55% of the violent crime in the United States, despite being 12% of the population). And most violent crime victims of blacks are...other blacks.
One thing particularly lacking in black communities is a commitment to education. My mom worked 3 jobs to pay for private school. One of my schoolmates was a similarly disadvantaged black male, who went on to graduate from Harvard. Like me, he had a mother that valued education. There are a lot of black children, however, that don't. Guess what...I'm not responsible for my classmate's success, and neither am I (nor my "race") responsible for the collective irresponsibility of black American culture which places a greater emphasis on thug culture than education.
Communities that invest in education succeed. Those that don't, don't. That's why blacks are mired in poverty, whites are treading water, and Asians are kicking ass, relative to each other.
Is their racism? Sure. I've never interacted with any racial group where there wasn't racism. But institutional racism holding the black man down? No, he's doing that all by himself these days.
How is it that you're accusing the guy of being racist on all the points where he complained about racists?
You don't state your race on a resume, which is good because it's none of their business, but:
a) many people have names that give it away and
b) the person you're responding to apparently does not find the reverse discrimination of which you speak to be particularly helpful, and since he explicitly said that he doesn't take advantage of it (on purpose), it doesn't help your point...
Apparently you are not human, because Japanese are human, and you clearly don't consider her to be one of "your" people. I would certainly consider her one of MY people. Unless you mean racists by "your people".
Wow. Megaracism there. I mean, he only MARRIED the woman and went on at length about how there was no issue to speak of except that other people had a problem with it...
A statement isn't racist just because it mentions race. It's a complicated subject, and saying "just don't talk about it" won't solve all of our problems.
I have never seen any act of racism when it came to hiring people in the I.T. field however I have seen a lot of situations where ageism prevented a candiate from being hired. In a couple companies I have worked for I have also seen sexism play a role in preventing certain female candidates from being considered. Mainly it has always been ageism in almost every company I have worked in.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
I am 50 years old. I wrote my first computer program while in high school in Fortran on punch cards. Sent it off to River Falls WI and a week later you get the results. I have been providing custom programming services for 20 plus years. Is their discrimination? Of course, I have never been hired for a project where a woman is the decision maker. As the years progress I find that everyone in the room is younger than I. I am discounted and my bids are rejected. I find that I like to bid things out over the wire (online) because who I am is not available for the suits/managers to evaluate. Discrimination is rampant, age, race, gender everyone has a biases. But I am an old dog, I will continue to succeed, deliver and make a living. I just won't all win all the battles. But life is good ;)
I would like to thank you for recognizing this and commenting on it. I also think this country has made tremendous progress over the years, but you would never know it from the way we are still continually harangued by the self-appointed spokesmen for the black community. For them, time is always frozen in 1859 or 1963, and America is always the most evil country in the world because of the way we have treated people of African descent.
I want to say this to the leftist race-baiters: The two institutions that did the most to eradicate slavery from the face of the Earth were the British Royal Navy and the Union Army of the United States. Yes, white people owned slaves, but we also abolished slavery. I don't think we get enough credit for that, and I think it's about time for a heartfelt thank-you from Jesse Jackson and his ilk, and an apology for the vicious and racist rhetoric they use when talking about white pople.
Muslims kept black African slaves before the Europeans ever did, as well as during the whole period of European/American slavery, and long afterwards as well. There are still black Christians and animists who are treated as slaves or worse by their Arab Muslim masters. Yet what does the racially hyper-sensitive black-studies major in this country do ? He drops his "slave name" and takes on a Muslim name. It's crazy, a symptom of profound historical ignorance, ingratitude, and misdirected anger.
One of my ancestors was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, smuggling slaves to freedom in Canada at great personal risk to himself, and another was wounded at the Battle of Chickamauga while fighting in the Union Army to free the slaves. My grandfather was a teacher who almost lost his job during the Red Scare becuase of his outspokenness, including his views on racial equality. My mom and dad hired black people in the 60's when nobody else in their line of work would even consider it, and lost some business doing so.
I don't buy into the "white guilt" that the extreme leftists and racial grievance mongers are ramming down our throats. My family has already done its share to help black folks. I treat them as equals and expect likewise in return. Jesse Jackson, Ward Churchill, and the rest of the angry anti-American quota queens can kiss my ass.
--ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Woe to those with ethnic names! Here's my story ... and I'm probably not the only one to experience racism like this. My parents, being the "funny" folks they are, decided not to give me an American name when they immigrated from Taiwan. (Funny thing, they took on American names themselves, and when my brother was born, decided to name him Kenneth)
Anyway, I speak perfect English (better than most, I would argue), did very well in school (3.9 GPA in CS), and had lots of experience, thanks to many summer internships at a consulting firm nearby (got the job through a friend of the family), and one internship at a government contractor (thanks to a scholarship I won at high school).
So, when I started interviewing for real jobs in college, I expected to do pretty well. Being from the Northern Virginia area, I submitted my resume to many of the government contractors in the area. Lo and behold, I didn't get very many responses. However, most of my caucasian friends, who had about the same amount of experience and grades as I did (or lower), were flooded with interview opportunities. Whenever I DID get an interview, the first question out of their mouths was usually, "Do you speak English?". After explaining to them that, yes, I spoke perfect English, their next question was inevitably, "Are you a citizen? Cleared to work in this country?" My answer again was yes, and in fact, I even held Secret clearance at one point (thanks to a previous internship).
To me, that's just an awful start to an interview. Now for the rest of it, I always did well (or so it seemed), and developed a good rapport with the interviewer, who promised I was a top choice, thanks to my grades, skills, and experience, and that I should hear back from them soon. I never did. My guess is that when they later had to make a decision, all someone saw was my ethnic sounding name, and if they weren't the one to talk to me, may have made many of the same assumptions as before (must not speak English very well, or has a thick accent, heck may be an illegal!).
Eventually I DID get hired, by a company that is quite racially diverse (see my profile for who it is). I've done an outstanding job at my position (at least according to my bosses and my reviews), so tough luck to all those former companies I interviewed for.
-- jchenx
Accents.
Not necessarily.
I am from the American South. Thus, I grew up experiencing whites to have a certain set of accents and blacks to have another set accents. With a *high* degree of accuracy, I could pick out the highly, "middle" and poorly educated of both races.
So, it was a great shock to me when I got out into the Real World and had hundreds of hours of long-distance phonecons with people up North who had "white" accents, but turned out to be black.
You can imagine that I'm much more cautious about labeling someone "black" based upon their accent.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
"I state the issue. They then rephrase the issue, adding something not really relevant to the issue but closely related to show how smart they are. I, out of politeness, say oh that's interesting, or some other meaningless drivel to show them that I too understand basic Calculus, OSI, or traffic law, etc. I then move on to state my idea for solving the issue."
No matter how smart you are, or how smart you think you are, you are never, never so smart that you are always right and don't have to listen to others. Going into a conversation knowing the answer means you're not really there. Not only is that rude, but it means if you're wrong you'll never know it. On top of that, people generally can tell (you didn't notice that because you weren't listening, right?) and won't be very happy about it.
I'm a consultant these days. I used to be pretty cocky, like I knew how to solve problems and those business folk just weren't as smart, but even someone as dumb as me figures out, after being thrust repeatedly into unfamiliar business situations (where the business people really do understand the problem domain better than me) that I don't know everything.
You sound like an interpersonal nightmare. I'd never want to work with a sysadmin who couldn't listen to the reasons he might be wrong. I'd much rather work with someone willing to work with the team, more interested in getting us all to the common goal than telling us how smart he is.
As for the racial thing, I know it exists,but my personal experience in IT and dev in NY is that it's been a meritocracy everywhere I've worked. One of the things, really, I've loved about the work. I've been on plenty of interviews where I didn't get hired, but absent feedback from the interviewer I can't see how I could ever make a statement as to why.
You know, you sound like you're a smart guy. The funny thing about this field (again one of the things I love about it) is how many smart guys there are in it. Whenever I start thinking about how smart I am, I meet someone smarter. As smart as you may be, there are smarter people out there. Unless you have recently won your third Nobel you ought to tone it down a bit, and think very seriously about what other people may have to offer you. Try listening.
By adding something to this topic so late, I doubt it will see any moderation, and I doubt I will add much new to the conversation, but I will talk about my experiences at my last position:
I worked at a mid-sized company based in the mid-west in a large urban area. The company had about 300 employees worldwide, but only about half at the corporate offices. The IT dept. was small, with a white director, a white system administrator, a black network admin, a black female support manager, a black female help-desk operator, a black computer technician, and myself, a white computer tech. Being mostly minority (is that a valid concept?) I heard grumblings in other departments being one of the few white faces that other employees saw representing my department. I heard people say things like, "Do you know why aspirin works? Because it is white," when complaining about the lack of responsiveness from the IT department before I handled their problem.
After people started losing their jobs because of their racial remarks, I stopped hearing the grumbling, but I am sure the frustration continued, and just because they weren't saying it out loud, didn't mean they weren't thinking it.
It doesn't matter how qualified someone is for the position, or how well they perform their job, race is still a factor people will critizise when someone does not perform as expected. Laws may have erased the racial lines, but until we as a society adapt, those lines will never truly disappear.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
;)
I never accepted a block, from anyone!
That of course, would be why you succeed.
I often find women in particular complaining about the "glass ceiling", and I'm boggled at the idea of anyone expecting to be promoted to the top of a company. Company founders will seek out successors who remind them of themselves, and there's nothing wrong with that. If anyone wants to lead a business, they should expect it to be a business that they themselves started.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There are a great number of people that want to say racism does not happen or is immaterial since they also experienced some hardships in their lives.
The only way to say racism exists is to see how the same person treats people of different races differently. Im sure your old enough and have been around enough to tell the difference between someone that is a jerk to everybody and someone that is a Jerk to you when the only difference is your Black.
I get the impression others aren't so sure.
Just because 200 is the upper limit of "measurable" genius, you think that the ghetto sysadmin might be making things up? :) Then, I guess that'd pretty well shut up the people who say those tests are somehow racially biased - as if recognizing an isometric drawing and quickly determining solutions to an anagram were more or less difficult depending on the color of one's skin...
I put myself through college, ass hole. With affirmative action, "minorities" got my place in my preferred college because of their fuckin quota.
Affirmative action has a negative impact for minorities as well. This guy is not going to see someone who is a minority in their class as equal but instead think, "you only got in because of your race - you're not as good" -- even if they had a better entry score. In a couple of years this guy may be in a position to hire people. So a fully capable worker comes in and is now judged, maybe subconciously, based on race. It's a flawed system that creates more racism in a mis-guided attempt to fix it.
It happens. When doing a round of layoffs, I was once instructed (2002) by HR to select only middle-aged white males, because "they can't sue." Back in 1998, when doing a lot of hiring, I was instructed to "prefer" minorities when evaluating candidates to increase our diversity. If you think discrimination against non-minorities does not ever happen, you should get out more.
That reverse discimination card is overplayed
There is no "reverse discrimination." Discrimination is discrimination. Period.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
"I've compiled a list of websites that you may want to spend more time on than slashdot:... ...*dons flaimsuit*"
Wait, I'm having a vision. There's fish, a barrel and a shotgun involved. Oops, sorry, it's gone.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Nice knee jerk reaction. I'm not even sure what you're getting at, but then again I've no 190 IQ.
preview before posting.
That being said, my dad's company faced discrimination for years bidding for local and state government contracts, because his company was not minority owned. A number of times, the winner would have cost overruns, or do the job so incompetently that his company was called in to try to undo the damage. The worst was when an agency like a school district would ask his company to do an analysis and write a proposal under the pretext of offering them the job, and then hand the work over to sweetheart minority friends with no bidding, or not allowing his company to bid, costing a lot of time and money.
Also, I personally have seen what fear of discrimination lawsuits can do, as a company I used to work for let two incompetent people stay as phone technical support rather than risk being accused of discrimination, because there weren't a lot of racial minority workers in that department. Maybe half of us were gay or bi, but I'm in a state where people still think it's okay to deprive sexual minorities of equal standing under the law, so that doesn't count. And I know this because that's what I was told by the department head, after I pointed out many cases where these two people would lie to customers, and put their systems in danger, or where I had to clean up what they did. I was told point blank that management knew, they monitored and saw the problem, but at the first warning, one of the workers hinted at lawsuits and then befriended the other one and got him in on the game.
It's real, and it happens. Look at some of the posts here, where when people finally admit it happens, they claim it's just evening things out. Two wrongs don't make a right.
I have worked retail too, but I can't understand the benefit of running two registers rather than running one twice as fast. Can someone explain this to me.
In certain situations it can be an extreme advantage to express your Jewishness. It can be a ticket to a sold out show so to speak. Prejudice goes both ways.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
I'll hire anyone as long as they're qualified.
I will say one thing though, an american degree is still highly valuable - regardless of your skin color.
I'm a 2000 man.
to not have to be afraid of the police
i'm gonna go tell my neighbor to be afraid of himself. ya know, being a black and a county sheriff and all. seriously man, you just said that blacks have to be afraid of the police. wtf.
One of my coworker was always facing discrimination because of his skin color. All his talent, knowledge, experience was overlooked in front of a white chic, who was miserably dependent on him for performing her duties.
Having stayed there, I have seen numerous examples. Canada is hell for Immigrants.
hilarious
I was once instructed (2002) by HR to select only middle-aged white males, because "they can't sue."
Anyone can sue, on any pretext at all. Whether they can prevail is the question. If any of those people laid off were made aware of that instruction, it could have cost the company a hell of a lot of money.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That being said, yes, I'm sure that some H.R. offices are practicing racist hiring policies as we speak, in defiance of ever-more-draconian racial quotas. Let's find those guys and prosecute them. But if we're waiting for a hypocrite like Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, or Al Sharpton to signal when the United States is "tolerant" enough, we're going to be waiting a infinitely long time.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
And how recently were those tenured professors hired? Sure, older tenured professors are white males and will keep their job until they retire. But when the university goes to replace or add professors, then the discrimination kicks in.
Most of the profs I know are young, thirties or early forties. The black professor (actually not African-American, but Carribean-British) is I believe in his early forties. You continue to make up facts (actually, you're no longer even pretending to state facts, only opinions.)
When I was in college, I had a friend who was an assistant professor of chemistry, experienced and well-liked. A professorship opened up, and he applied, but was never offered the position. Instead, the university kept the position open for nearly two years, interviewing several dozen applicants, none of whom were white males. My friend, like many recently graduated chemistry doctorates, never did find a position teaching chemistry.
Professorships are hard to get. There are very few. Not to state the obvious, but even if your story ends with "and they hired a black person", your friend's inability to get a job does not mean it was the fault of his race. It is entirely possible -- although you perhaps would disagree -- that the applicant they hired was both better than your friend, and black.
Plenty of people get turned down for good reasons, and plenty get turned down for bad ones (a recent case in my department, e.g., where someone was sunk for petty personal reasons despite being popular and an excellent researcher.)
Cronyism is not automatically racist.
If you hire people because they are your friends, and all your friends are white, then, yes, it is racist, and you would deserve to get sued if a qualified black applicant was turned down in favor of a less qualified white applicant you took because he was your friend.
As I said before, I suggest you talk to friends of yours you trust -- not colleagues who you dislike and think should have been fired -- who are black. Ask them what they think about racism, tell them what you think. Have a discussion. You might learn something.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
How about you start by looking at the department of labor statistics for current employment trends for January 2006 (here).
The unemployment rates for adult men (4.3 percent), adult women (4.5 per-cent), whites (4.3 percent), and Hispanics or Latinos (6.0 percent) showed little or no change in December. The jobless rates for teenagers (15.2 per-cent) and blacks (9.3 percent) declined over the month; the rate for black teenagers had an unusual large decline and fell to 24.4 percent. The unemployment rate for Asians was 3.8 percent, not seasonally adjusted.
Clearly I was wrong. Blacks and whites are discriminated against in favor of Asians. On the other hand, most Asians I've known have either been hard workers or intelligent or both, while I've known plenty of lazy and stupid black and white people. Also note that while the unemployment rate among blacks is over twice that of whites, large numbers of those are in the inner cities which have poor economies and are losing jobs at much higher rates than the national average (Heres an associated press newspaper story since you're so keen on them).
So lets take the inner city out of the equation by looking at the geographical and skill data (here). Conclusions? I would say things aren't far off when the statistical margin of error is taken into consideration. And further its obvious those in the more highly skilled professions have much lower unemployment rates, regardless of race.
And this was just in 10 minutes. Research grasshopper. I stopped believing stats from newspapers when they started quoting blogs as informational sources on a regular basis. Just because they get it right 99% of the time doesn't mean I'm going to trust them 100%,especially when my life experience has taught me otherwise.
Lighten up. Its only a post.
either that or they could start deporting the unemployed to their country of origin.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
... of course, I work in Japan.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
The answer to "Is There Still Racism in IT Hiring Practices?" is obviously yes. The question is how much. My guess is less than in most contemporary fields and less than IT of years past, but those are guesses.
It's worth noting that South African Apartheid persisted approximately 30 years after the US civil rights movement.
The main problem with racism in the IT industry today is that people are prohibited from competing for jobs on a level playing field based on a condition of their birth.
... in the corporate world
;~(
might as while accept it, the longer you live in denial, the less you'll make
so just suck it up and get used to selling out
look around, everbody else has, you might as well too
1) With large companies: actually has a slight preference for hiring women and minorities if they can find them because they are keenly aware that their development group is lily white and male and they don't want to be sued.
2) With small companies: absolutely color blind. If you can do the job and they can understand you when you talk, you're in.
Now, with that said, in my entire 20+ years as a professional programmer, I've only known 4 black coders and probably less than 10 female coders. In my class of 87, there were probably 3 female CS majors and no blacks.
I did hear once from an exec that a woman I worked with complained that we started at the same time but, several years later, I was highly respected and she was still getting crap jobs. Personally, I think that was because any time people or programs gave me a hard time I tore them down and rebuilt them to better specifications, while she tended to take a shy-and-retiring approach to life.
Clear, Dark Skies
At the large publically traded digital media and gaming company I work for, most of the platform developers are Indian and most of the QA team is Chinese. Both groups have a number of women. Business management is almost 100% white and 80-90% male. Technical management has many Indians and Chinese and a number of white males -- several QA managers are female, but none of the development managers are. In many of the meetings I am in, I am the only white guy. In the last 5 years, I've only met two black males working in the local IT market (and it is a big market).
... from Asian and Anglo parents, all I got to say is "HA!".
It is so great to hear other people talk about race relations and the tension in their voice/posting. You know, it really REALLY doesn't have to be this hard.
As a manager for many years, the amount of non-Anglos that would applied for open or closed positions were close to the same ratio in the city population. I would be concerned if I didn't get any Hispanic, Asian, Indian or Black applicants.
I would also be freakin' pissed if I found out my recruiters were racially screening my applicants.
Race relations asides, I know that my boss and my coworkers think I am godsend and love the work and expertise I bring to the table.
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
I am posting in reply to this article so that I won't be moderate it. This is because everyone, apparently, is an idiot.
So much for your former IQ of 190. I put your current IQ at about 110 - a typical pissed-off BOFH.
190 is totally meaningless -- if he really had a 190, he would have also reported the name of test, mean, std dev, std error, etc. He also does not say which norms he was scored on too! Stick to computers and relax -- you're among friends here.
You're story about people reacting to your idea likely has little to do with race and significantly more to do with either 1) poor management, or 2) your attitude.
;)
I'm white, I grew up on a farm, the son of a tech ed teacher. I grew up constant trying to learn the hows and whys. I wiz my way through logic tests, rebuild my own engines, remodeled my own house, solder my own electronics etc...
When I got out of the military, I was a slightly younger guy who thought I knew it all and could figure the rest out. And I ran into numerous situations like the one you described.
It actually turns out that I was just an egotistical ass hat. Cocky and arrogant coming off of my last military tour.
It took a couple years, a wife, a kid, and a hell of a lot of hard knocks, but my ego finally deflated and I find myself getting a long with most people much better.
Let's face it, no matter what their skin color, all assholes are brown on the in side
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
We used to have a guy working at our company who was a complete jackass and a slacker. He was also Japanese. He used to brag, "They can't fire me. I'm the only asian in the department."
He was let go about two years ago.
There may be a handful of people who think that's the way the system works.
It does not.
I've found an awful lot of people who think they are being discriminated against, white, black, asian, whatever simply didn't have the skills necessary for the job. Slashdot had a story a few years ago about a study that showed the more incompetent you are, the less likely you are to realize it.
Oh for crying out loud. The very notion that whether racism exists in hiring practices varies by industry is laughable. We're talking about human behavior for crying out loud. It doesn't switch on and switch off based on a position's SIC. The question barely merits an answer.
Oh wait, racism. I forgot, discussions about racism are always about how someone else has the problem to be sure, because we realize "we" haven't reached utopia; but maybe "you" and/or your personal/professional space have. So we gotta figure out whether "your" space works the same way as "the rest."
Red herring, red herring, red herring, and a real insult (irrespective of intent) to those who have their livelihoods upended by racism on the job (or trying to get the job) daily. You want to talk about racism in hiring practices, talk about ways to mitigate it. Stoking a debate about whether this industry has found some oasis the rest haven't (i.e., whether this industry has anything to resolve at all) doesn't help, not even remotely.
It's bad enough being accused of being high and mighty just because you know how to work with computers and can do it for a living. But to actually legitimize catcalls from the non-IT space by proposing that somehow IT may not have the same issues of race in hiring that other industries/disciplines do... which would require that somehow IT be inherently more humane, evolved, moral, homo superior, something or other... cripes.
The person who was told he'd get a job just because he's a caucasoid was being misled. I've been turned down for dozens of IT jobs. It wasn't until I gained some better experience and some certs that I finally found better jobs in IT. IT is a very competitive field. Even with the skills and experience it's hard to get a job.
I think the real question isn't race but age. When you see a 50 year old netadmin versus a 28 year old admin, who do you think has a better chance at getting an IT job? Save your pennies NOW, fellow /.ers. We'll all be 50 before we know it!
I state the issue. They then rephrase the issue, adding something not really relevant to the issue but closely related to show how smart they are. I, out of politeness, say oh that's interesting, or some other meaningless drivel to show them that I too understand basic Calculus, OSI, or traffic law, etc. I then move on to state my idea for solving the issue. One of three things happens.
That's not racism. That's just a pompous asshole. I have to deal with it all the time engineering/I.T.
It's amazing the things that can create barriers to interviews. I went without a job for 3 months (long ago), shaved my beard, and landed a job at the next interview I got.
Clear, Dark Skies
I worked in an IT department of about 14 people... the mix evolved from 50/50 white American & Hispanic and became more diverse over time. Race would not have been a factor as long as you were competent and polished in your demeanor. Soft factors like demeanor seemed to gain in priority later on. I think that if a candidate showed up demonstrating a lot of obvious ghetto dress or culture, that it would have been to their disadvantage. It would not have been a good fit. There were women also as time went on.
The only thing that might be called bias was sort of an unevenhanded tolerance that some people got and others didn't. A favorite female or females might speak roughly to users, do mediocre work, obstruct projects, undermine a co-worker, and call those exact faults on somebody else. Once it got started, this was unchallengeable. The boss liked women of a specific ethnic background and treated them differently. AFAIK that was the start of that kind of hard-ball divisive competition on that particular IT staff. Managers out there, anybody wanting to retain "respect by example", emphasize results and de-emphasize personalities...it might be worth noting how this got planted and rooted. What happens when the boss has a blind spot?
In general i have to say that competence won most of the time; your demeanor and culture came second; and in a small number of cases there could be a total exception for both. Sorry to disappoint anyone looking for a tidy conclusion. Things are pretty mixed out there. You will see whatever you expect, and some of what you don't.
the politics of racial identity tend to emphasize those groups rather than helping us blend them together; so it doesn't surprise me that people tend to think of groups.
Clear, Dark Skies
At one place where I used to work, if you were female of of a certain racial ethnicity, you were *guaranteed* to be promoted into one of the most coveted divisions/positions within a year. Really. In fact, in the most coveted division, virtually every single person was female or from that certain ethnicity.
Oddly enough, the racism worked both ways, there were other, less "cool" ethnicities which were virtually guaranteed *not* to be promoted.
On a better note, every place I've worked in the last decade has been free of any of that silliness.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Then you sir are the embodiment of the American dream(the real one, hard work to achieve any goal). God bless you.
I am a Unix admin at a rather large state university in Texas. There are a total of five admins (the other four handle Windows issues) in the college where I work. We are all seconded there from an IT group called "Distributed Support." Of the five, I am the only anglo ... the others are asian (3), and hispanic (1), so I guess this recruiter hasn't gotten the message yet.
utter rubbish
The government is forbidden from "respecting" one religion more than another, but religion is often not one of the categories covered by civil rights laws in the US.
It's that annoying "freedom of association" clause in the constitution, you see. The only reason, IIRC, that race and gender based discrimination could be banned is that the government could demonstrate a "compelling need" to create a race and gender neutral society.
Clear, Dark Skies
Those technical debates you have with collegues are part of my daily life. It's the not-invented-here syndrome. You imply it's race. It's not. That's just how techies talk. It's annoying.
Most of the time I have to package and sell ideas to my coworkers and management. But you'd know that, seeing you're a master salesperson.
No doubt I can't understand racism because I'm white.
There's still racism in hiring practices, but these days it's in favor of non-whites.
Having worked at a lily-white organization in a large northeastern city, this phenomenon became apparent when I noticed, over the course of some five odd years, middle management was falling over themselves to hire black sysadmins and support staff.
Some of these people were less than qualified, but what could anybody do? They're there to increase the minority head count, so management isn't going to fire them. This has a detrimental effect on morale, but non-minorities can't do a thing but pick up the slack, knowing they'll never be fired.
Worst of all, this has a terrible effect on the minorities who are well-qualified: They're brought on to do a job and other folks in the department automatically think: "oh...we're going to have to pick up the slack for this one...damn".
At one point in my career, I worked for a company that had some surprising racism. I found it out by looking at statistical trends, which was pretty depressing.
I managed the intranet that the company used to upload/download documents, share electronic "whiteboards," post announcements, etc. One system we built for the intranet was an employee review system. Normally, we wouldn't even see the data. However, we had a bug with the reports, and needed to do at least a spot-check. While in there, we noticed that white males had low scores; everyone else, high. Not just in 1 or 2 cases, but predominantly in at least 2 divisions, and more mildly thoughout the whole company.
Eventually, one of my employees was bothered enough by what he saw that he mentioned it to HR. Within 6 months, the HR manager was replaced, my team was gone (including me), and every other white manager in my division was replaced.
None of us ever sued or retaliated in any way. The company was in a downward spiral, so we mostly just laughed and got better jobs.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
I will say one thing though, an american degree is still highly valuable
Presuming you can:
1)Afford $128000 minimum over 4 years without loans
2)Have enough connections to nullify #1
3)Have enough to live on minimally to get through said 4 years if you have no Skull and Bones equivalent membership.
4)Get admitted to a University that places people in H1B-free, highly paid territory if asked.
5)Graduate and have a job before the next H1B crazy administration gets in.
Unfortunately, to even do that, you would have to nationalize the admissions process, guaranteeing any US Citizen (preferably by birth, or by naturalized citizenship) non-waitlisted admission to any college, fully funded for all 4 years due to H1B quotas.
You could also sell your soul, but we already know what happens to you in the end.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I think Asians are the most discriminated-against group in America. We are the only minority that is not included under the supposed "equal opportunity" laws. This, despite the fact that Asian (males in particular) are underrepresented in the most prestigious and highly-paid jobs in the US - professional athlete, entertainer, and CEO. It's really a shame that racist laws even exist to give certain ethnic backgrounds special privileges. If these "equal opportunity" laws were passed because minorities are discriminated against in the workplace, then it should apply to ALL minorities. The scary fact is that Asians prove that there is less discrimination in the workplace than the equal opportunity laws would suggest. And hence the media and other minorities bury our success so their discrimination theories won't be refuted.
> This particular recruiter insisted that his years experience has led him to this conclusion
Perhaps you should ask a recruiter with more than just a year's experience.
Max.
I saw an american black guy seeing me like a some kind of freak at the Home Depot because I did not RESPECTed him in his way. When he asked me if I need a help for finding Home Depot product, I said no with: I did not looked into his eye and I was somewhat being defensive when I'm saying No. And he gave me "....Ohhh Kay.... Ohhh Kay..." feeling. Oh god. I understand that feeling. You give me that feeling when you think I am a racist.
Or maybe it was because of your defensive response. Ever try just saying "No thanks" calmly and politely? I do that every time and I rarely make eye contact (mostly because I'm in the right area and I'm concentrating on finding what I need). If you look confused (and let's face it, anyone that's not looking directly at what they're going to buy looks confused to them), they're going to ask you that. Hell, sometimes they'll ask you that even if you're holding the product. It's part of their training. Ya know, that little thing called "customer service" that we're always bitching about. Anybody would likely have the same reaction that guy did. White, black, green, orange, it doesn't matter.
The only people I know of that want to be "respected" in a certain way are the gang members. But since they deserve no respect, they don't usually get any.
Right, but if you show up to an interview for a professional job (i.e.: working in an office setting where business attire or business casual is the norm) looking like you just stepped out of the latest rap video and wreaking of pot or crack, then it is safe to say that you will NOT be getting the job.
Now, for those that are afraid of not being able to get a "decent" job, it is up to you to put forth the effort, even if it is 100 times what everyone else needs to put forth, to educate and prepare yourself for such opportunities. Again, I say that you are responsible for yourself, not the MAN, not your school (by the way, here is a secret, Schools are not fashion shows, nor are they there for you to hang out with friends and act all cool. Try using the resources available to you in the education system to elevate yourself from your self induced poverty level), not your parents, or anyone else you may think of to blame your failures on. You are the only one you can blame for not rising to the challenge.
As an IT manager and former soldier, I require a certain level of professionalism. There are many things I look for in a candidate. Dress code, appearance, lingual abilities, ability to perform the job to my satisfaction (very high standards), attitude, and more. These items are not mutually exclusive.
Now as far as Race is concerned, it is not in my hiring practices to worry about race, but if I feel that you will not represent the best in me and my department to everyone else in the company, then you do not make my team. If you make the effort to better yourself and come back with the right attitude, then I may be inclined to work something out.
As a black person I experienced it a lot when I was job hunting. I noticed when I stopped putting my race on applications the responses almost doubled. I have a "white" name and a "white" voice (so I've been told) so interviewer would seem to like me just fine on the phone. Every time I would walk in for an interview, the interviewer would get a surprised look on their face and I could just tell no matter what I did or said I wasn't getting the job... A friend of mine who does a lot of hiring for his company once told me that sometimes blacks will be avoided in IT because there stereotype that blacks don't work well in groups. I am a senior tech at my current job and still experience problems. I am more knowledgeable then most of my fellow techs, but people still feel that they need to explain basic concepts to me that they don't ever seem to have to explain to other newer techs. It doesn't matter how many time I prove myself with difficult technical issues or impress our customers, I'm always treated like a child by my coworkers and management. I'm trying my best not to get bitter and become the stereotypical "angry black man", but after four years of this crap its getting harder every day.
Why would you take a recruiter seriously? Many of those folks are simply parasites; insinuating their way in as middle men through dishonest tactics because they aren't really needed in an age where it is so easy to match people with folks that want to pay them to do jobs.
One of the largest bottlenecks to finding jobs today seems to be that these headhunters have convinced companies to hide the fact that they need someone combined with the headhunters clogging up the places for employers to communicate to potential employees! It's absurd in most cases where rare specialists are not required.
I've seen discrimination on all parts: Age, Race and Gender.
.02
The department I was working in was mostly white (about 80%) with the rest being asian. Only 1 actually working in the department was female. During the hiring process, I've seen young kids get dropped as well as older with the median being around 35 years.
Company wide however, the statistics are a little more disturbing with approximately 60% being white, 30% being indian and 10% being asian. Male to female ratio is pathetic at around 50:1 with most women working in legal or advertising.
But personally, I think the EOA needs to go. Filling slots because they're of ethnicity prevents good people from getting into areas that would benefit the company. Most employers i've seen have a pretty token diversity policy yet tout it like they are changing the world.
And no, I don't think that a person's sexuality should be basis on whether or not they get a job no matter what they claim. It should always boil down to whether or not the person will fit into the position.
my
boom goes the dynamite....
One black poster talked about the racism he has encountered, despite being exceptionally qualified. He speculated that black people don't get taught important critical thinking skills, which he insists MUST be taught, and further points that public education just doesn't provide for this. I think this is certainly a part of the problem.
Now what does slavery have to do with this? Slavery left black american culture decimated - I just don't get people that insist that black people should be over it by now. That's impossible - those that take this view simply don't understand culture - too much is passed from generation to generation, and it takes a long time to build that base. We are more of a blank slate at birth than people realize, it is culture that in large part defines our behavior.
Imagine coming out of slavery after living as a supplicant for so many years. How do you think former slaves raised their children? How well do you think these parents taught their children to cope in a society that values self-sufficiency and independence? The parents were taught to be afraid all their lives, and conditioned to obey the masters will. Most just didn't have the experience to sufficiently prepare their kids for the society they entered, and so these effects have rippled for generations. This goes back to the critical thinking skills that the black dude mentioned above was talking about. These kinds of things MUST be taught and many black american kids aren't getting it.
This cultural disability of sorts is also complicated by issues of identity. Not only is it hard for black parents and their kids to cope in a society that expects them to value critical thinking, but to value such a thing it must be taught in the first place. But many black americans loathe the idea of being defined by something they identify as belonging to the oppressor class. To learn the value of it they have to at least be willing to imitate it. And they don't teach this kind of thing in public school either, so it comes down to home life. Public school just tends to prepare people for more supplication. So we are stuck here in a bad feedback loop, though one that is being corrected slowly to start, but one that should quicken with time.
In an academic setting (Canada) I've yet to encounter this sort of rationale.
I guess the best anyone can hope for is to enter a profession where merit is the prominent factor in determining whether or not you get the job.
UBU
Well, but you do have the extra added cost of launching/housing said extraterrestrials in/from secure areas. Area 51 doesnt come cheap. Nor do its workers.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
No, I think you are correct in stating that PBS, the US government and the SCOTUS are not examples of "angry bloggers."
In the middle of getting the occasional flamebait and offtopic mod for my posts here (they seem to be disappearing) I never asserted that affirmative action doesn't exist. I absolutely resist the use of the doublethink phrase "reverse discrimination" (is that incrimination?) to describe it.
First of all, and most importantly, the case listed in [1] was not the result of civil rights legislation. It was a decision made by the company -- and IMO (from your summary) a very poor one. Why is this company trying to plump up its stats? My guess is that they are worried about workplace discrimination and unfair hiring practices, and are trying to compensate for it in case it ever goes to trial (no, we can't be racist, look at this black guy.)
Contrary to popular belief, black people can be awarded jobs on their merits. Companies doing stupid things are another matter.
[2]. I completely support affirmative action, especially in university admissions. I've posted a response on that elsewhere.
[3]. 2% of all discrimination cases being a case of whites making claims certaintly would not occur to the vast numbers of posters on this thread who claim that the answer to "is there still racism in IT" is "yes, it's racism against whites". The level of victimization cultiness going on here is wild.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
If I remember my queueing theory, which I don't really, the qualitative answer is that one slowpoke can stop traffic for everyone and cause a tremendous backup in the second case, but not in the first. I used to have quantitative information about this sort of thing, but it's late and I've forgotten everything.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Look at any modern company. There is a rainbow of different people.
If your racist, make sure you hate everyone equally -- by doing so you'll be politically correct by not discriminating against only one race.
Racism has it's place -- like when you're trying to get out of jury-duty!
"Therein lies one of the problems that some black people feel when they are in the workforce. Some wonder if they are only there because the hiring company needed to fill a quota, which completely negates all the hard work that they did."
But they still have a job, don't they? If I were an inferior employee and was hired because of some quota, I think I'd feel pretty lucky.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Racism and sexism remain problems in hiring in IT as well as other fields in the US. I have personally observed racism and sexism in hiring both in the US and abroad. The dot-com era seemed to have particular discrimination as people with little experience who physically looked like an IT stereotype got the job (highly qualified candidates being generally lacking). This hurt women and some people of color.
Overall racism in hiring practices is substantially less of a problem in the US than most other countries in the world. In the US, it is commonly accepted that racism is bad. Period. Most people know that there are at least a few racists out there and condem their actions. People who do overtly racist things such as say they won't hire non-whites are looked down on. In much of Europe racism in hiring is very common and even fairly overt. This is a good article about racism in hiring in France in the Washington Post.
What you described happens to everyone. It has nothing to do with skin color.
This is just another example of the battle of language, where pro-immigration groups use this to OK a silent European genocide. Why Europe wants to be a homogenized US of Europe confounds me.
European works for me, as long as we exclude the Turks who are a group onto themselves.
Unless you mean racists by "your people". Really, you might find life a lot easier if you considered everyone to be "Your People". I know that I don't care what color a person is, but as soon as I hear someone seperating people by their race, I do my best to just avoid them in the future. That is both personally, and professionally.
His "people," which I take to mean "his folks." Most likely, he's talking about his friends and family.
You assume that YOU are discriminated against, but discrimination goes every direction.
Likewise, you assume his use of the word "people" to be malicious. A lot of racism starts as accidental slips, escalating into all-out conflicts. It would be best to follow your own advice: before flying off the handle, check your assumptions and try to find out what the other person actually means.
In public service areas, the percentage of blacks working at the fire station/police station has to be the same percentage as the number of blacks living in the area. Same goes for women. As a while male who's been a volunteer fireman for two years, and wants to pursue a career in the field, it is almost impossible because right now all they care about is meeting that quota. I remember asking some high up people about it, and they told me I'd either have to turn black or get my penis chopped off, because they won't be hiring any white males anytime soon. They'll hire a black male or woman with no firefighting experience, no physical strength, over someone like me who is certified, experienced, and dedicated to the job. I've forgotten the idea/dream of becoming a paid full time professional firefighter. Good thing I'm going to school for computer science/business administration, something else that I love in which I hope isn't taken away from me because of "reverse racism"
Sig: I stole this sig.
You never heard of Affirmative Action.
"In employment, affirmative action may also be known as employment equity or preferential hiring. In this context affirmative action requires that institutions increase hiring and promotion of candidates of mandated groups."
Life is not for the lazy.
I wish I still had my mod points. The parent should be modded sky-high.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I'm boggled at the idea of anyone expecting to be promoted to the top of a company.
The newspaper I work for is now on it's 3rd publisher in as many years. Not a single one of them worked for this newspaper before. They are usually "Director of News" coming from other papers or other companies. No one here ever expects to become Publisher.
If you had a 190 IQ, you wouldn't have to work for the man
My greatest weapon against racism is to forget it. What's race got to do with programming something in linux? I always look for people who have a certain perspective and experience to help with things. Even perhaps different styles. From my point of view, we need everyone. The following isn't the best list, but something that I've started. I always try to look beyond the problems and focus on the solutions. The movie patch adams taught me this, and I took a lot of philosophy from Star Trek.
...
From the old people: experience in how to get things moving along. What not to do and so forth
From the young people: knowledge of bleeding edge technologies, and new methods of attacking problems.
From the men: Serial thinking and concentration to drive a certain part of work
From the women: Multitasking ability to conceptualize many parts in a dynamic framework
From all the different nationalities: Different points of view and styles.
I really don't care about race or age or any other label that can disect us more. I'm only concerned with if you're able to bring something to the table. I have respect for anyone who has a sound idea that's been well thought out to help move things along.
When it comes to racism, I'm reminded of Chris Rocks's HBO comedy show. He was saying how he didn't support the advancement by race just because of quotas or otherwise. But it there's a tie
A way to Martin Luther's vision exists. It existed for years, and I call it the internet chats rooms. "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today." Chat rooms in their earliest forms had physical anonymity that forced everyone to judge them on what the other typed. Now we have webcams etc. It was nice while it lasted.
Carlos Mencia, also a comic, had a bit about jobs. "If you're a small man, the tall man took your job. If you're a woman, the men took your job. If you're a fat man, the skinny people took it. It you're black man, the white man took it. If you're an asian man, the white man took it. If you're a white male, affirmative action hgave your job to the asian, black, the women, etc etc etc" He started that bit by saying, "America had a dream. If you work hard enough, you can accomplish", still holds true for me. I focus on the solution, not the problem.
I'll go one more to say this. I draw upon my background and philosophy to make decisions and come up with new ideas. For the majority, I see the Indians, Asians, White, and all mostly men. I wait impatiently for blacks, spaniards, russians, women, who are competent to bring sound ideas to the table. Why? because they have a different take on the same problem. I'm just waiting for the day when the outcomes of open source and open hardware gets hired. I wait for the day when some poor black kid straight from harlem says, "Yeah I fought off the bullies at school, and saved enough money to buy a xilinx virtex board and loaded the free sparc architecture on it, and was able to put free linux on it too. I modified a voice recognition thing to detect gun shots, and it targets the sound source and shoots a tazer gun." Or someone down south (of the equator) to come and say, "Yeah, my mom always made way too much salsa, so I was able to use that as an energy source to power the mp3 player I made out of junk parts, because you can make energy from fruit, why not salsa" etc etc etc. Only reason why this doesn't really happen is because they don't know that it can be done. Solution: AMD's 50x15 project. I love that idea. And I'm sure that there are many other ideas that needs to be thought of and done to make this work.
Like I said. The best weapon I have against racism is to forget about it. Since I'm not going to tell you what my nationality/age/sex is, you're just going to have to read this and determine if I'm intelligent or an idiot. How many more labels can you put on me with only what I've written? Of course in real life, we have things called eyes, and I try to use what I've learned from the Jedi, "Your eyes can deceive you, don't trust them" "How can I fight if the blast shield is down?" "Trust your instincts"...
There is definitely a subculture of minorities out there who like to use their minority status as a crutch and leveraging tool in the workplace.
There are individuals of every race who use the race card to gain an advantage. I've seen some of it for myself.
At my college, there was a group of a specific minority that would always cause trouble on campus. They had been documented for a number of campus rules violations, and in some cases, had city Police citations issued to them. However, they always seemed to get off scot-free.
There was a final incident were a student was assaulted and property vandalized that finally caused the school to take action. One of the perpetrators, an alumni of the college, was arrested and banned from the campus.
You would think it would end there, but it doesn't. About two weeks ago, she shows up wanting to watch the Men's basketball team compete. Campus security gives explains the official policy and tells her to leave, but she demands to speak to the Vice President who set her punishment. To make a very long story short, in the five minutes of their conversation, he reverses his earlier decision and allows her to stay on campus.
There is more, though. After talking with several security officers, resident assistants, and even a hall director over the last two years, I had learned that this particular individual, whenever faced with punishment for her misdeeds, threatened to sue stating that she was only being punished because she was a minority.
There are individuals who will always be willing to use whatever advantages they can to get ahead, even if that means using a tactic like the race card.
My Sysadmin Blog
I dont think he is racist but i dont think he is doing something that is hurting the community of african americans and americans together. I dont understand why african americans are seperating themselves from american in general. I live in a area where there are just as must black people as white, some times more. I have never seen racism take place in the work place or any other place. Though i have seen people try to use "racism" as a easy way to get people fired and then get one self promoted. Now dont get me wrong, maybe in the boonies there is racism. I dont know, i live in a modern city. I believe in the modern world "racism" is a tool used by the "victim" to manipulate there enviroment to there advantage.
Clearly I was wrong. Blacks and whites are discriminated against in favor of Asians.
Speaking as an asian who gets discriminated against on a regular basis, it's been my experience that because I'm NOT black, noone is willing to take my discrimination cases seriously. Let me assure you, it's not all quiet on the 'eastern' front either. We just get a lot less attention for it.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
True. When you hire the less qualified candidate based on thier race, it is plain, old-fashioned discrimination. There is nothing reverse about it, in and of itself -but see below. The fact that you defend it elsewhere, and claim that it isn't discrimination at all if it's in favor of a minority is an issue all your own.
;->
The first case I cited, was definitely an example of what we have reaped from our "affirmative action" (i.e "two wrongs make a right") policies and legislation. WHY are they, as you guess, trying to compensate? Is it, just perhaps, because the current state of our laws regarding "affirmative action" makes them feel they need to bend over backwards (hence the "reverse") and to go out of thier way to ensure that an "appropriate" level of each minority?
And, just for the record, I never stated that black people couldn't get jobs on thier merits. Nor anything close to it. thankyouverymuch.
Btw, thanks for admitting that there are at least one or two examples out there, which was my point.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
.. and it's crazy to cover your ears and go "la la I'm not listening." So you'd say that 50% of the female tailors and florists should switch careers with bricklayers and binmen?
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Flamebait or troll or not, I accuse you of flagrant exaggeration, if not outright lying. Your use of language, vocabulary, and compositional structure is self-evidently sharply below that level. As is the vocabulary and compositional quality of your other recent posts, eight of the last ten of which scored 1. Your expository and vocabulary also jarringly conflicts with your assertion of "a nearly insatiable desire to read whatever I could get my hands on."
The point of which is, don't lie on this forum. Making a knowing transgression of risking off-topic for this reply or not, I dislike letting that by, and it taints the rest of your post, the meta-moderation of which I would suggest ought consider whether the moderation points were deserved.
As an aside, also, the vast majority of IQ tests, including upper range IQ tests, are not designed to accurately test above approximately 170. Test calibration above that level is very challenging. Try and remember such tangential details the next time you fib, for better general congruence and background.
Sigh.
In inferiority complex, perhaps.
In the future, try posting without repeatedly referencing how smart you are, and how your brilliance is oppressed by vast forces opposing you. Your posts will implicitly convey deviation from the norm, if they can in fact exhibit such, without needing attempts at neon signage.
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, preserved their neutrality." -Dante
I've worked in IT, and because I can calculate multi-dimensional state tables in my head I can sometimes out route a router.
I've worked in sales, and because I have a firm grasp of sales psychology I can typically close sales (it took 3 other salesmen combining their sales to beat me once and they only beat me by a fraction of a percent).
I've worked in retail, and because I can multitask like a well designed Unix Daemon, I could work multiple registers simultaneously (during Xmas season it's often quicker to do it yourself than explain to a temp worker for the nth time how to do something).
Well hello mister fancy pants. So instead of helping the temp worker to actually learn how to operate the cash register (and therefore increase their skillset), you do it for them. This doesn't help anybody and you make the temp look like a moron. Maybe they are stupid, maybe not. But doing that doesn't help them to learn how to do it. Hell, talking them through it would be better than just doing it for them. Or maybe you just like to do twice the work for no extra pay? I wonder how the boss felt about having a temp standing there doing nothing, and being paid, while his other worker did all the work. It only takes longer until the temp gets the hang of it. But I guess you were born knowing how to operate a cash register and never had to be trained yourself. Yeah, I didn't think so.
As for the sales thing, I won't even touch it. I hate sales people. I've never worked in sales specifically but I worked a few years in retail and they teach all about the psychology of store layout when you work in retail (candy goes near the checkout because it's an impulse buy item and most people won't buy it unless they're on their way out the door). When I was at Blockbuster, returns, and the video lookup system, were on the exact opposite side of the store from the entrance. Most people will come in and walk around the new release wall, probably grabbing a movie or two along the way, before they get to the returns stack. That's why that's done. Anyway, the point is that the psychology of retail sales is probably similar to the psychology of a sales person. The object is to get the person that walks through that door to buy something by the time they leave. It doesn't work on most of us because we probably went to that store for one specific item and we aren't likely to buy anything else except that item.
When you hire the less qualified candidate based on thier race, it is plain, old-fashioned discrimination.
;->
I never said that. As I've repeated over and over, I support affirmative action in many cases and do not consider it a form of discrimination. I consider it an imperfect, compensatory solution to historical and contemporary racism. We can debate the meaning of "qualified" unto infinity; my guess is that, in the broadest sense, most beneficiaries of affirmative action are more qualified than the whites whose positions they receive preference for.
The first case I cited, was definitely an example of what we have reaped from our "affirmative action" (i.e "two wrongs make a right") policies and legislation. Is it, just perhaps, because the current state of our laws regarding "affirmative action" makes them feel they need to bend over backwards (hence the "reverse") and to go out of thier way to ensure that an "appropriate" level of each minority?
I believe many companies have problems with racism, and that they try to compensate for it. The example you cited I think was a bad way to do it: it was underhanded, and possibly extreme.
You see only the bad consequences of a culture attentive to racism in society. You don't see the gains we've made. May I suggest you look to the recent riots in Paris for an example of how countries who take the views you do -- that affirmative action is, and can only be, "reverse racism" -- survive?
And, just for the record, I never stated that black people couldn't get jobs on thier merits. Nor anything close to it. thankyouverymuch.
I didn't suggest that about you!
Btw, thanks for admitting that there are at least one or two examples out there, which was my point.
I am not some crazy monster! It is a big country, and shit happens. But I maintain, and the data bear me out, that the overwhelming problem in our society is, and continues to be, discrimination against minorities.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
That was, hands down, the most well put comment I've ever read on /.
Both of those options will allow him to leverage extreme intelligence as well as mathematical and sales aptitude. Both will get him out from the oppressive man's foot quite rapidly. With a 190 IQ, he should be able to come up with a pile of other good alternatives, too.
Honest truth here. I'm a white bastard. And you know what? I've had the exact same types of conversations The Great Oppressed Black Genius described with people when I identify an issue. It's not a racial thing. It's an "I have a brain and that is intimidating to people that want to remain necessary and keep their job" thing.
*sigh* 190 IQ multi-linguil person works as a system admin where apparently people discriminate against him. I just don't buy the whole post. I think it's BS. None of the pieces fit together. One of our VPs is a black man and he is sharp as a whip. The company offered him a CTO position and he turned it down because he had a better offer on the table from elsewhere. He was really good and everyone respected him and though he was very bright, I bet he was not even close to an IQ of 190.
Well, anyway...
Oh, dear. All of those brilliant people over at www.iqsociety.com have not grasped a big Don't of web design: no "mystery meat navigation". Mystery meat navigation is when a navigational link is represented by a completely irrelevant picture, at least until the cursor is over the link. Maybe a genius thinks differently, but I've never associated lightning strikes with contact information. Apparently these geniuses missed out on some skills, including user friendly web design. But worse, they used
Microsoft FrontPage
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
According to Darwin, it must matter, or we wouldn't have different colors, :-).
People with a high I.Q. can easily fake a lower one.
- "They misunderestimated me."
I've seen offices so uniformly H-1B Indian that being Caucasian was a definite negative.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
How is it that a computer programming major can't type? You know where the "shift" key is, right?
Or, are you an ignorant nobody with an agenda to push?
DATABASE WOW WOW
People who use a "black accent" are far more likely to be poor than people who use a "white accent", both because blacks in general are poorer than whites, and because many middle and upper class blacks have mitigated or never had such accents. Could your prof imitate a "poor white trash" accent? I think that experiment would make the point much stronger because the race and class issues would be disentangled.
However, I don't doubt that your prof is right - there is racism in markets such as housing and lending.
Yeah how much did it cost to go to your school? If you think its easier for black people to get a job because their black your living in fantasy land
Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to be in a position to hire some developpers. A number of résumés where presented to me and I had to select from them. I interviewed and ended up selecting: an Iranian, a Check, a Chinese and a Pakistani (all of whom were recent immigrants). Here's what I got: a very dedicated, creative team who built software that allowed me to slaughter my competition. Competition who, as it turns out, happened to be racist and politically motivated. If I had chosen the same route as my competitors and let my judgement be clouded by neanderthal thinking, success would have eluded my organization. So, if you are the competition, by all means, please be racist, 'cause, if you do, I'm coming to beat you!!
*** Don't be dull.***
...I have felt I have had to work twice as hard to get noticed when working amongst non-Latinos/Blacks. It was the only way to be noticed. The Spanish last name makes people automatically assume English is my second language when in fact my entire family has been in the United States for over a century now. The Latino looks make most think I don't have any technical skill. Even when I open my mouth to speak (I have a BSCS, and can speak quite well, thank you), most still assume I have no technical skill.
No, it's not an issue of trying to prove myself as "overcoming the odds". I can care less about that. However, I do feel subtle stereotypes make most perspective managers feel at first glance that I'd be better suited for some ethnic studies position at best.
NOTE - I'm a tanned latino with brown skin. There are many light skinned latinos with more of a european influence which would make them more likely pass as "white". I am not one of those. Also, for you non-Americans out there, there are not many pure spaniards that live in the US, so no you can't try to argue that the last name could also imply I'm from spain.
I've been a programming manager at 2 different jobs. The first was a printing and mailing house (we wrote interfaces for tape data to print hardcopy on Xerox 8700/9700 printers). When I worked there, I was "given" a new employee (hired by the VP, who was my boss) who was black.
Now, I realize that you cannot generalize on one individual (that's called how discrimination gets started) but I have to say that he just couldn't cut the mustard. He had a laid-back attitude and when I would stop to see how a project was going, he'd have made no progress and would tell me he tried this or that and it didn't work. I finally told him that he either needed to a) come to me when he hit a roadblock so I could steer him around it or b) get industrious and dig through the manuals and FIND a solution on his own.
What I learned from this is not that one race is smarter/dumber than another. But I think there is a culture in the inner city that breeds a low-effort mentality. Perhaps we need to do a better job of teaching ALL kids better problem solving skills.
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
I don't think your example has much bearing on the racism question posed. But I'm responding because I may have some experience to help you.
I'm guessing you're young and new to the industry, possibly entering the permanent work force for the first time. Data entry is entry-level work, low end, low paying (relative to other IT jobs, that is).
I suspect you didn't get a callback because you outclassed the expectations of the hiring parties. I ran into similar issues early in my career. I dressed professionally. Less professional people resented it and accused me of "trying to impress someone." Many of those people were in entry-level positions-- including HR. And while they didn't have the power to hire me, they had the power to disappear my resume (which also outclassed expectations, by simple virtue of having one).
Let's try another angle. Wearing a suit? That means you have a job that lets you afford it. Nice suit? Nicer job. Nicer salary. Hey, you're more expensive than I'm willing to pay for this position or your abilities. Buh-bye.
Your problem may simply be that your game is on a shade ahead of everyone's expectations. The good news: you will get jobs that value talent and professionalism. The bad news: the jobs that stink (which there are abundantly more of) won't look at you twice, and you're going to be slighted and feel slighted every time. Eventually you'll wonder what's wrong with you, or what they "all" think is wrong with you.
Incidentally, I'm African-American. And I went through exactly the same kind of situation you described, over and over again. Big staffing firms that moved a lot of clerical labor-- in fact, outfits like "outsourcing agencies for various things from tech support via phonedesk to your very basics of transcription or data entry"-- were particularly bad about this. I finally figured out what was going on when their eyes glassed over during the interview. Big smile, very happy, mucho impressed, no idea what to do with me. I knew more than they did. Woops.
After some years in the biz I was skilled enough to get a toehold in a staffing firm that wouldn't talk to you unless you were Tier 3 or higher IT material. They're gone now, but wow, what a change. They were interested in skilled people, because skills made them money. You had the skills, you meant money. The other outfits were simply low-grade meat markets that made their money on volume and turnover.
Hang in there. If you're worth your salt, in 10 years you'll be so far ahead of everyone else it will actually make you laugh. Especially if you get one of those "big time four year degrees." A four year education is worth something, and without one you'll eventually be swimming alongside those who don't have one because they lacked the dediction-- or ability-- to get one. And the pay will match. Good luck.
If you hire people because they are your friends, and all your friends are white, then, yes, it is racist, and you would deserve to get sued if a qualified black applicant was turned down in favor of a less qualified white applicant you took because he was your friend.
No it isn't. Racist would be hiring them for being white. That you hired a bunch of buddies may look suspicious to an EEOC worker, and it may be hard to defend in court, but it isn't particularly wrong. In fact, it's a good idea - presumably, you have a better idea of how good those people are at their work through knowing them.
/AC to preserve mods
If his IQ was 190, you would think he could work out a way to stop working for The Man.
Yeah well, IQ is overrated, or at least a minor factor in getting rich.
Honest truth here. I'm a white bastard. And you know what? I've had the exact same types of conversations
Yeah, me too. Being smart leads to freaking people out.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
never said that. As I've repeated over and over, I support affirmative action in many cases and do not consider it a form of discrimination.
;->) made. Because I have never comment on same. May I suggest that you look to what I actually type, instead of attributing positions to me? thankyouverymuch. It is interesting, and telling, that you feel the need to do so, however.
Yes, I know you said that you don't consider giving people prefernces based on thier race is not a form of discrimination. The fact remains that it is. The fact that you support discrimination that leads to what you consider to be a "compensitory solution", while claiming it is not discrimination is, as I said, your issue.
I believe many companies have problems with racism, and that they try to compensate for it.
And I believe many companies live in fear of being CALLED racist and so go to extremes to make sure they have the "right" percentages.
You see only the bad consequences of a culture attentive to racism in society. You don't see the gains we've made. May I suggest you look to the recent riots in Paris for an example of how countries who take the views you do -- that affirmative action is, and can only be, "reverse racism" -- survive?
You don't know what I see, or don't see. I have made no statements as to the state of race relations or racism in society (let alone the subset that is the IT industry). You don't know whether I see the gains the US has (or hasn't
And I think it is really a strech to try to claim that the riots in Paris (and the rest of the country) were due to the fact that the country of france took the view that affirmative action is, and can only be, "reverse racism". If you wanted to claim that the riots were due to anti immigrant prejudice (that spans generations) , or just plain old racisim, you might have a case. But the claim you make is just silly. Were the riots due to concerns over reverse racism, it probably would be those who felt they were harmed by same who would have rioted.
OH, and I didn't say that "affirmative action" is, and can only be, "reverse racism". In fact, you might have noticed my use of quotes around the term. "Affirmative action" in the form of outreach, educational assistance, training, etc (i.e. what it supposedly was when it was introduced, back when it wasn't going to be a quota system...). I have no issue with. What I have an issue with is hiring people based on the color of thier skin (or thier gender) instead of hiring the best person for the job. Or giving a person a merit-based position (such as admission to a university) based on skin color (or gender) rather than merit. Again, the fact that you don't think such is racism, reverse or otherwise, is your issue.
I didn't suggest that about you!
Well, that's good to know. Of course, it makes me wonder what that free-floating "Contrary to popular belief, black people can be awarded jobs on their merits." in your prior post was meant to attach to...
But I maintain, and the data bear me out,
You started off, maintaining, and copy-and-paste bears me out: "Now would be a good time to provide newspaper accounts of such things. Yes, I'm sure if this happened, many would be unreported. But surely there is one good man or woman out there who will speak up with a specific example?" That is what I origionally replied to. And it is still my point that such happens.
Oh, and for the record, I STILL haven't made any statement(s) about racism or race relations in the US. I just propose the radical idea that people should be judged by the content of thier character (and thier qualifications), and not the color of thier skin. Regardless of the color of thier skin. The fact that you interpret this to mean anything more than, or different from, that is, again, your own issue.
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
What if I don't want people in wheelchairs in my establishment? Yes its discrimination but as a private business owner shouldn't I have that choice? If it were a public (and by public I mean either government operated or specifically called public (like the public library)) I would concede the point. But as a private business owner perhaps I want to exclude a certain demographic for whatever reason I choose and in a free society, I would be able to. What recourse would those that I exclude have? They could organize a boycott amongst the non-excluded, picket my business on the public sidewalk, or start a letter/email writing campaign, etc. etc. etc. to get me to change my behavior. Those are acceptable means to an end. Hauling me off to court just so you can squeeze me for some cash + access to a building that you'll probably never go in anyways? Now your infringing on my negative rights (freedom from's) and that's just wrong (the Constitution protects and enumerates our freedom from's).
If you want to be an entitlement bitch, go find some government building that doesn't have certain ADA-acceptable accomodations and I'll support your campaign 110%, but if I don't want you in, STFU, GTFO and STFA.
I feel its fine that private individuals (and by extension their privately (or collectively) owned (as long as the gov't has no shares) business) discriminate based on their morals. I think there would be a lot less violence if people who wanted to discriminate (and take no liberty with that, by discriminate I mean not associate with, I don't mean hang from a tree or some other violent expression) could do so freely. Want to create a master race? Find an under-populated country that you can over-populate with your own followers and go to town. Just don't kill anyone in the process and we'll be fine. I already don't associate with bigots, wife beaters, perverts (and by that, I mean peeping toms and the like), muggers, murderers and the like. By the definition of the law, I am discriminating so by associating with only those I choose to associate with, I have become a criminal, only I guess its more apparent when I put up a sign that says "Friends Only Allowed Inside".
Such a shame indeed.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
True but ultimately meaningless rant
You may be true, but at the end of the day you're the Genius Sysadmin who everybody thinks is hung like a mammal ten times your weight, so quit bitching.
Mark me flamebait if you wanna, you know I've got a point. . .
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
My parents moved from India to England in the 1960's, and then later moved to the United States in 1975. I was born in a pretty affluent town in New Jersey and had a really well-rounded education. I never really experienced any kind of racism growning up, until now.
Working in the IT field, I am surrounded mainly by "fresh off the boat" Indians and geeky white dudes. When I first joined, people kept asking me if I was a contractor. I didn't realize until later that most of Indians there were contractors. My boss also asked me about my Visa status. This was before I even knew what the hell an H1 was. I have an easy to pronounce Western name, yet people keep trying to pronounce it wierd, or ask me what my "real" name is.
I got a new iPod video the other day and brought it into work. One of my white co-workers wanted to see it so I showed it to him. While scrolling through my list of artists he had a really confused look on his face and said "You like Panetra?, How can you like Panetra?" Maybe I should wear a dot on my head and wrap a towel around it? I didn't bother to tell him that I was a drummer in a punk band for 10 years.
The pain really starts around lunch time. The Indians don't invite me to lunch because they probably think I'm too white, and the white guys don't invite me to lunch because they probably think I'm with the Indians. So I end up eating by myself everyday enjoying Slashdot on my laptop.
So the point is that there is racism in the IT industry, but not necessarily against the conventional minority groups.
Nonsense! It's a great measure of how good a person is at doing IQ tests...
http://outcampaign.org/
I think its safe to say that most tech workers (or in my case medical/social) are above average in the fancy book learning area. The key words here are above average. We are out side of the average and so we are different and since we are different we get discriminated against on top of our skin, gender (the one that I feel sometimes because I am the only male in my work place), or what ever.
Could your prof imitate a "poor white trash" accent? I think that experiment would make the point much stronger because the race and class issues would be disentangled.
Now you know, that's an interesting item you point at there. Up here in Portland, Oregon, where there are barely enough "black" people to shake a stick at (2% or less, as I recall), the "white trash" are running around banging loud rap music, "tricking out" their cars, talking with stereotypical "black accents," and even getting the syntax and context of a lot of the slang right.
It completely blows my mind. Of all the things I figured I would have to deal with as an educated black person who clawed his way out of the 'hood, I never thought I'd be subjected to the occasional cultural "out-blacking" by whites who had neither the education nor the motivation to keep up with me.
How's that for a sociological experiment? It's an eye-opener, at least as long as you can stand to be around it. It certainly suggests that at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, things are driven a lot more by class than people want known.
I call bullshit on them and prove it.
I believe that black people are discriminated against at many different levels, but what you are describing is not racism - it is standard techie interaction. Overcoming the "face saving reflex" is always a necessary part of almost any interaction with a large percentage of technology workers.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Uh, don't tell me you'd be sad if you receive less spam.
After all, since you don't seem to have difficulty getting job offers in the first place, this is a GOOD THING.
This way you don't have to waste time with companies that aren't interested in hiring people based on merit. No need to apply to, interview for, or even work in a crappy company with crappy management/bosses.
Think about it, if they select people that way, what sort of people will you be working with and for, AND what are the odds that you'd be promoted or given pay rises based on merit?
I'm assuming you are looking for a long term job, and not just a short stint, and aren't desperate to find _any_ job.
You're so well spoken.
Most of the people who read this won't understand that first line, but if you are what you say you are, I'm sure that you will.
Every time you are forced to show someone that they're wrong and you're right, take joy in it.
An intelligent and educated black person (especially a man)is not something that most people in our society have been conditioned to accept.
It seems to me that you are dealing with it. There's really no other choice.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
well that's kind of irrelavent as the question is - is there racism in hiring practices.
you've talked about how you think you have a unique view of the world - do you think that's because you're black or might it just be that everyone thinks that?
you've crapped on about your difficult customers and about how you try to hide your race when you apply for a job, but that does not really addressed the topic at hand does it.
in any case, critical thinking is not all it's cooked up to be.
Oh please..
I get so sick of {insert your race here} people crying discrimination when other perfectly reasonable explainations exist.
Yes there are a small group of small minded people that still think it's ok to discriminate against black people, but 99% of the rest of us are tired of being accused of being racist just because we don't like you because you're a jerk, lazy, always using the race card to cover your ass, or because you're difficult to work with. People react to the way you treat them. If people are always dissagreeing with you, then likely they don't like you. I really doubt your race has anything to do with it.
If you want to see discrimination.. look at how fat people are discriminiated against. There's no Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, or Affirmative Action for fat people or a college fund for them either, but see how many of them are turned down for jobs they are capable of doing just because they're fat.
My advice for you.. quit trying to prove your co-workers wrong and let them figure a thing or two out and you'll see your 'racism' go away.
I just propose the radical idea that people should be judged by the content of thier character (and thier qualifications), and not the color of thier skin.
Sure, we are at a common impasse. I claim that black people suffer from racial discrimination, and that compensatory steps need to be taken. You (curiously) refuse to make any statement about racism; given that you are interested in talking about affirmative action, I find that strange. Given that you are making sweeping statements about whether or not we should have affirmative action, I find it rather presumptuous. If there was no racism, I strongly agree with you that affirmative action would be wrong.
Racism exists in America, and it have thousands of subtle effects none of which can be proven individually as racism in a court of law. I suggest, as I have suggested to others in this thread, that you talk to friends of yours who are black (I am assuming, given your comments, that you are indeed white) about racism. Ask them about it, ask them what they think about affirmative action, tell them what you think. I promise you will learn something.
As for me suggesting that you're racist, I didn't; I don't actually believe you are racist, just naieve. You may have been one of the people posting as "Anonymous Coward", however, in which case I suggest not taking offense.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
My experience has been a bit different. I'm a network admin in a team that until the last two years had been exclusively white. We hired an asian manager, and since that day all of his hires (which has come to over half of our little department) have been asian. Most are buddies of his from the old country, and while most of them are perfectly adequate in their roles, and have become valued friends of mine, there is a glaring exception in the form of a field technician\help desk analyst that can barely communicate in English (to the extent he has been forbidden from answering the phone), is unimpressive technically, and has a annoying habit of vanishing for half a day, multiple times a week. To salt the wound, the guy has the gall to complain that we send him into the field too much.
Bringing these concerns to the manager gets him talking tough, but he ultimately ignores the problem. While deriding the rest of the team for minor lapses, his pal gets to go AWOL without being questioned. It is absolutely disgusting, and it's been going on for nearly two years. I have no problem with a man's race (that's just stupid), or even with favoritism (he's the boss), but I'll be damned if I'll sit around while UNQUALIFIED "high school" buddies suck the life out of my team, and all I can get out of management is "Yeah, it's a problem".
Unfortunately, appealing to the senior management hasn't yeilded any fruit, and so I am leaving the position ASAP.
It's not the average who count for Nobel Prizes, major advances in tech, science, arts or even stuff like chess, tennis, F1 racing.
It's the extraordinary ones.
So it doesn't matter so much even if the average from a particular group is below average, the big deal is whether the "exceptionals" are really really good.
Of course it would mean that such a group with a "below average" average might not be as good at producing "cannonfodder" workers.
In reality, the curve is unlikely to go that way. But it is something to keep in mind, especially when so many people seem to like to compare the averages for these.
Sure there may be reasons to compare say the average 100 metre runners from various places. But AFAIK, it is more usual to compare the top runners.
The slashdot public is made up out of 90% of caucasian, single males between the age of 20 and 35, spending 90% of their spare time behind the computer.
If you can IRC and put together a complete english sentence without grammar mistakes and witless black slang words who'd ever know you're black? You'd be valued for your knowledge and honesty.
I'm not sure if your example of why you are at a 'disadvantage' is because of your race, or, quite simply (and this is said with respect, of course :)), you're a geek.
The people you're conversing with will vary in their geekiness: some will insist that They Have A Better Idea (usually they don't), some will think "duh, I should have thought of that, so obvious now that you said it," and some will be in the middle and think "maybe -- go for it." Some will just be confused and tell you to go do it because they have no idea at all what you're talking about.
It's just that geeks (including you, and probably most of the people in your example) are not exactly known for tact or good in-person communications (see Asperger's Syndrome). You say what you believe, which is fine and dandy, but it will also annoy the hell out of people sometimes.
Just because you're black doesn't mean that all the bias against you is from race: there is plenty of pressure from neurotypicals, and geeks are sometimes just as hard on other geeks as NTs are.
Umm, childhood IQ tests can't test above 180, furthermore if your IQ is 190 you might want to get hold of Mensa and the Guinness Book of Records because that would make you the brightest man in the world.
Not being a geek is a serious disadvantage in my job; I can't abide anime. I don't spend my time on anonymous open source projects. When someone mentions a favourite RPG, I think of rocket propelled granades. I don't use messaging apps, I don't blog and don't waste my time on political advocacy. Also, as a side effect, I don't spice up my posts with meaningless references to 100K+ income, japanese wives, snowboarding, intellectual status or favourite linux distributions. I am European. Aside from the fact that this automagically makes me a sex dynamo, it means that you are wrong. The lot of you. I am tan, svelte, athletic, smart, sexy and immaculately dressed. I drive exotic machines at speeds incompatible with simple reason or american law. My girlfriends never shave their legs or armpits. Whenever i'm NOT being paid radiculously large sums of money for taking advantage of honest ahmurican ingenuity, i spend my time in a cafe, bistro or the ski slope in the high alps. I have a swiss bank account AND an accent which makes your hoo-hoo tingle with anticipation. After all that is said and done, having worked in my field in several EU countries, I mostly see geeky caucasian men doing what I do for a living. Of course i mostly see geeky caucasian men in most other it/is related positions, but that is likely because geeky white men outnumber geeky coloured men, non-geeky men with IT/IS qualifications in the EU. Is this racism? I'm willing to bet that dark skinned penis gourd wearing hunter-gatherers outnumber caucasian penis gourd wearing hunter-gatherers in Africa, oceania and Asia - is this a coincidence? Should we demand equal opportunity for all penis gourd wearers everywhere? Is the paucity of caucasian penis gourd wearers in Africa, asia and oceania indicative of predjudice and racism practiced by the majority on those continents? What about the average caucasian boy who wants to be a penis gourd wearing hunter gatherer? If we look to our own Johnny Weismuller, we can readily see that it's not easy being a caucasian hunter gatherer in a coloured hunter gatherer neighborhood. Johhny was reared by apes because the coloured villagers who lived in his immediate area didn't want to care for a caucasian baby ( some say it is because the locals killed his family)and throughout his very successfull stint as tarzan he was more or less constantly accosted by local toughs because he was different and because he stood up in the defence of other, similarly put upon individuals of both sexes and several species. Despite his impressive record as defender of the put-upon, Johnny was a virgin until late in his twenties - merely because he was a caucasian in a non-caucasian neighborhood. Despite the predominance of non-caucasian females in his area, Johnny had to wait for a succesion of caucasian women to fill the role of Jane. Is there a reasonable explanation for why Johnny - a native of africa who grew up to love and defend the same environment his non-caucasian peers were living in - was shunned, rejected, denied the most basic interaction all people deserve? Was he p'haps jewish? Racism is an ugly word, but not as ugly as the automatic assumption on the part of many that their pet peeve is the linchpin of the world. Get over it - Johnny Weismuller did.
Is There Still Racism in IT Hiring Practices?
There wasn't racism in IT hiring practices to begin with. The article implied that there was by using the word "still". Please refrain from calling people in my profession racist (I really don't appreciate it).
Thanx muchly,
BBH
So do you ever use your "point" as a weapon? You can just as easily say people are being racist against you, if they do not agree with you.
I have some what the same situation, although I am caucasian. I do not exactly look like your average IT worker, being with earrings, a bald head and slightly erratic personality and a metal-punk attitude. But I am very good in what I do and also a team player in my job. Still most new people I meet seem to think I work in a sweat shop fixing cars or in a construction yard. I usually do not bother to correct them.
"You can hire coons, niggers and wops, but don't hire fucking stupid people."
He also allowed smokers to smoke in the office because he did.
Task Mangler
ha...
it is indeed very funny that you ppl have such discussions in the US, while nobody here in India would even think of the skin color while hiring.
and you blast off the indian caste system without even knowing what it is!!
What is without doubt it that there is a subculture of white people who have gained and retain a significant advantage in the workplace on account of their race.
Now would be a good time to provide newspaper accounts of such things.
How about you stop attacking and just understand the points of his post. No that is not racist at all!
"This particular recruiter insisted that his years experience has led him to this conclusion - but I wonder: what the collective experience of the Slashdot readership has found?"
my 8 year old, mildly retarded daughter speaks better english than this without trying. no, i'm not kidding.
[btw, i'm always baffled when i see people posting in forums about high end pc components ($1000+) they've bought and know *nothing* about, in the kind of english that would make a parrot laugh. whatever happend to 'fools and their money are soon parted'?]
Culturalism != Racism
These days, if you disagree with a non-white about anything even REMOTELY related to their culture, they feign racism. Call out a white guy in ghetto-basketball-circus attire and you're perceived as calling him an idiot, but if it's x-non-white, then my god you're a racist!
You're all hippocrits, and don't have the intellectual honesty to own up to your own views.
To believe that all cultures are equal is like saying all ideas are equal. Hmmm...Is it better to boil bacteria infested water, or drink right from the river? God forbid the (white) ghost people come in and influence your religious water drinking tradition...or bathing in sh_t infested rivers.
Just because european cultures have happened to rise to power more recently (in terms of centuries) doesn't mean anything....history keeps repeating itself. Get over it, and do something useful, like go make a friend or something.
I don't go to the youngest or oldest guy. I let the first idiot walk up to me thinking about how much money he can make on me, I let him talk me up and I slowley go from complete idiot to super geek. After about 10 minutes, they realize they're in a situation that they can't get out of and usually end up trying to assist someone else.
Usually after this,
I don't care if you'r young, old, black, white, gay, or whatever - if you don't know what you're talking about and you're about the money, you're not going to help me.
I don't think that simply "hiring more black people" should be seen as a sign of progress. This kind of issue just serves to distinguish between black and white people more. What we should be looking at is the quality of candidates and the work they produce rather than the colour of their skin.
It is of course not right if somebody is overlooked for a job based on their skin colour or religious beliefs. But it is also not right to simply play the racism card if it happens to be that there are not _enough_ black people in an industry. After all, white people don't scream racism when rap videos only feature black people.
Well, at least they use Unix :)
9 378
(but PHP 4.1.2 ? wtf?)
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err... what about the white Buddhists, atheists, other non-Christians? how did they tell the faith beliefs of the white folks but not of other folk?
I noticed a similar thing when I was doing my CS degree at a 1960s UK University. IIRC, there was one black guy in my year. The university as a whole seemed to have representative proportions of black and south asian students (though admittedly, I wasn't privy to the statistics), but hardly were doing CS. Amongst the black and asian non-CS students I met, knew and spoke with, variations on Business Studies seemed to be the most popular (as a 1960s university, we didn't offer degrees for many of the traditional professions, unlike the 'red brick' and older universities).
I wonder if the thinking amongst UK black and asian students who have the opportunity to study post-18 is that if they're going to do a degree, they might as well do one which is likely to be financially rewarding and always in demand - e.g. the traditional professions - medicine, law, business etc. If so, any employer who selects on the basis of a 'CS or related' degree isn't going to get a representative proportion of black or asian applicants.
I'm interested in hearing from anyone from minority ethnic groups who have any anecdotal evidence supporting or refuting my hypothesis.
A simple look at employment statistics http://www.opm.gov/feddata/demograp/02demo.pdf would reveal rampant reverse discrimination.
It is difficult to explain how minority and female employment figures are constantly rising (even to percentages above relative population within the U.S.), while white male figures are constantly falling without considering reverse discrimination.
Clearly this does not apply to the highest levels of civil service, which I admit appears to be almost exclusively white males, however for middle management and below, the figures are astonishing.
Don't get me wrong, I do not judge a person by race
I will admit to judging the fairer sex, mostly by bust size, and leg length, try as I might, I can't seem to avoid this - but that judgment was against suitability for mating, not against professional competence.
I have worked with some very talented people in my career, many of them people of minority status, and I don't ever remember considering their race - or sex - when judging their competence.
As an asian I have often found it to be an advantage t be an asian, since many people have this stereotype of the dedicated, hardworking, smart asian (boy, where they wrong with me.. just kidding!). Even here in the Netherlands I am sure it gave me an edge. On the other hand, a moroccon friend of mine, also very diedicated and smart, does not get invited for an interview because of his moroccon name. And that's bad.
So I suppose you are on the hiring committee? Or at least a regular interviewer? If not, how do you know there were more qualified applicants? In fact, how do you know there were any other applicants? I have noticed a similar trend towards hiring of less competent employees, and I am privy to hiring information. In our case, it has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the overall expectations of applicants, both in required skills and pay. One simply cannot hire (or retain) brilliant, motivated, well-suited employees if (a) they don't apply, or (b) they expect exhorbitant salaries.
It sounds to me like you, or at least, the majority of your coworkers are simply racist. If every time they meet a new hire, who happens to be a minority, and assume the person is going to be incompetent, that is what we call racism, my friend. If I meet 10 arrogant caucasian sysadmins, should I then assume that all caucasian people are arrogant, and therefore shun them? Of course not, you say... so where's the difference?
Perhaps I have a different perspective because I live in a place where there is no majority. Growing up, no more than about a quarter of the people I met were of the same ethnicity, and in that sort of environment, it is hard to develop a racist mindset, I suppose. Maybe the best I can hope for is that some day this sort of diversity pervades most of the world, and consequently smothers racism, but that's far more optomistic than my observations support.
In the U.S. federal government, age is a non-issue.
On the projects I work on, the project managers are charged the same for my time regardless of my salary, so they have no financial disincentive for using me instead of a younger person. They also have to pay overtime, so it's not like they can get a bargain by abusing a young person's willingness to put in extra hours. In many ways unions lead to waste, but in this case I'm glad for it.
In some cases union-influenced system can be amazingly frustrating. Some people abuse the system and basically put in no work AND getting paid for seniority. But for others of us, it's very liberating because it lets us pursue the skill specialization needed for the job. If we didn't have these protections against age-based hiring, I'd always have to ensure I'm working on skills that are broadly marketable. As it stands, I can focus on developing skills that are narrowly useful but are important to my job.
It's also worth noting that while you can't necessarily stay an employable code jockey until retirement, you can keep a technical career going. Where I work, you do that by getting into research. Now on a typical project I spend less than 10% of my time coding, but I get to help design ad hoc network protocols, learn how to statistically characterize sensors, etc. It's not pure coding, but it's MORE DEEPLY techincal, and it's only possible because of my age/experience. So in this case, age/experience OPENED techinical doors for me rather than only closing them. (Note: if you get your PhD from Stanford or MIT, you can skip directly past the age/experience thing and can start doing what I'm doing upon graduation.)
You have a point there, but I think it's on your head
Well, people react not only poorly to you, when you are right. People always react poorly when someone else logically proves them he is right and/or they are wrong. Having to give in to logic makes almost all people always feel like being cheaply tricked, since they cannot reasonably do anything against it.
People want emotion and passion and feel good about themselves. Not reason and logic. That's why Bush wins elections.
So I won't say this is specifically something black encounter.
But well, as a German with blond hair blue eyes and a face of a concentration camp doctor I get my fair share of comments too.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
It often goes something like this.
It sounds to me like you're treated like every other sysadmin in the world. In my experience you'd get the exact same reactions if you were white.
It's amazing what people will assign to race or racism, even with no evidence.
If you are black, non-white, and/or female then perhaps South Africa will be good to you. In South Africa there are government mandated requirements to hire in order of preference; black females, black males, coloured / indian females, coloured / indian males, white woman. And finally company's are heavily dis-insentivised to hire white males. Due to the extreme lack of interested parties in the foremost group being black will almost certainly ensure a job, being capable and black will ensure a highly paid and lucrative career.
And to make things even better, as a black person you will be in the vast majority of the population (can't remember the exact statistic, but it is in the order of 75% of the population).
So for a better life come to South Africa.
PS No white people wanted, you have your own countries to infest, please take the one's here back.
My observations are
- Small companies tend to hire less people from minorities. That, it appears to me, comes essentially from customer pressure : if your workforce is small and some of your customers openly ask not to be served by "north-africans", you tend to hire more "whites".
- Some companies have an history and a culture that makes them think some people might not "fit the company's culture". I heard it once in a big company. In this case there is no excuse to it. That's probably where positive discrimination might be somewhat useful.
- Some other big, multicultural companies, are much more open because they can afford to value people "only" based on their competence, and naturally present a mixed population. The company I work for, a french bank, is particularly remarkable in this matter. It was even striking at first, because way different from any other (smaller) companies I've worked for before.
In my experience, you can see that in quite any field. What makes IT particular is not its nature (IT), but its population (higher-educated people,Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.
In e-mail? In a meeting? Or at the desk? Because to get that sort of instructions in an e-mail would be pretty funny to print out.
In the past, managers promised me things in a private meeting and after the meeting, just before turning right to the coffee corner, I'd ask them, "Oh by the way, can you put that on an e-mail to me?".
Sometimes they do. Often, they get pissed and then I ask why such a little request irritated them. Always, the mail is completely different from what's promised.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
AGE - I have personaly been descriminated against due to my age, was contracting at the age of 18 and see alot of companies still pay equaly skilled people the different rates due to there age.
:).
EXPERIENCE - I have on many occasions as have many others I know been refused even an interview on jobs as the company deems you over experienced, yes overqualified. there attitude is that they ASSUME that you will leave soon as. Well alas assuming somebody is something and acting upon it is indeed descrimination but alas they get away with it.
As for race, sex, sexual preferences I would say things have on many planes leveled to the extent that its fair, least in majority of cases. Only area were there seems some imbalance is sexual oriantation were there is a clear case of positive descrimination in favour of say lesbians, cross-dressers etc. Friend I know had sex change and cross-ressed, soon as he did that he got promoted and huge pay rise and new company car after few years of being stagnent and in same year the company was actualy cuttting back. I have also seen people promoted over others who were in balance less capable than the person that didn;t get the position only for it to transpire that the person who got the job is a lesbian or homosexual. I have no calms about any gender/sexual oriantation and bottom line were all pink on the inside, but would appear that many of those in power over-react for fear of reprisale of being called into court for descruimination becasue they didn't give such people such positions/jobs. As such there is a trend still prevailing for positive descrimination, least thats what I have witnessed and aware of from others within the UK. One left-wing council I believe you can walk in with a gay-pride badge and almost pick your position.
Anyhow it will level out, just whiched people would focus on actualities rather than knee-jerk to there paranoia. But when IT peeps are forced to wear a shirt/tie knowing fullwell the servers dont care, well you see the industry still has a way to go. But dont get me started on the subtleties of what women and men are allowed to wear at work.
So if you feel that a company is descriminating, I suggest attend the interview in a dress, you will either get the job or highlight a case of descrimination and have a laugh, thats if you have the guil to do it
I see the point you are making and I do agree with most things you have said. However, it seems to me that you (like the GP) are trying too hard to impress people on this forum with your intelligence. The GP has opted to show off by stating his IQ, while you have tried to impress by using some over-the-top fancy grammar and language. You could have stated your points using much simpler language.
damn-Belial6 I love how the people that aren't being discriminated against, are the ones to be upset when someone speaks out. I love the "things are getting better" which I answer with "yeah only 10 white girls were rapped this year as opposed to 12." I know this sounds harsh but YOU HAVE TO ADMIT- No AA in Design No AA in IT No AA in __________________ (fill in the blanks) All you have to do is look at your own work place and you will be able to see. Take off the BLINDERS- Like Dr. King said "some people think their white skin gives them privilege."
- the fact that you failed to consider their race. If ignorance of the law is no excuse for braking it, then ignorance with respect to race is no excuse for failing to grant preferment to the racially opressed. Logic is not the answer, reasonable behaviour is inapproperiate in the face of discrimination. You should just feel guilty.
Why the hell do you "WHITE" people think that "Black" people don't know racism when we see it? What the hell? Ya' got Gaydar We have racistdar. After hundreds of yrs we just know. The thing that will tell you if racism is dead is the day you actually go to the "Black" neighborhood and live because the rent is cheaper.
I know that the world has come along way, but you have to admit that there is still a ways to go. I have seen the racism on both ends in the IT world and quite recently as well. I am a white male, age 32, clean cut professional looking IT Professional. I have been on the board when prospective candidates come to interview for more that one company mind you. The way these boards usually work is to have either a manager or supervisor from several different aspects of the company such ass HR, server support, front end support, sometimes sales, you get the point. The purpose is to see several things like the knowledge of the candidate, how they handle pressure and what type of problem solving skills and people skills they have. I have see very qualified candidates turned down in lieu of lesser qualified candidates and when you look back the only thing that sticks out in skin color. I heard a conversation once were management would actually discuss ways to decline candidates that would not appear to be racial. On the flip side, even though I am a white male, age 32, clean cut professional looking IT Professional, I am also a Gay white male, age 32, clean cut professional looking IT Professional and have been on the receiving end of this myself. I have been called back for several follow up interviews and while discussing salary and start dates, I would ask if they offered domestic benefits and would not ever be called back with a hire date or an explanation. Come on, your talking salary and hire dates and then you drop off the map. I must admit that I am quite lucky as I have learned not to ask such things until after I am hired or get a package and read all the fine print. I know that this might be viewed as cowardly or devious but a person has gotta eat. I can see how someone how is of a different race is not so lucky. I will admit that the IT Industry as a whole is much better that say oilfield or construction work. I do find that in the IT and for that much the "White Collar" world, there is a tendency to be much more coy in the discrimination. All I know is that it is 2006 and we need to wake up really fast. Peace
good point. Now how do you explain the flood of dirt poor hindoo and chinese into IT? You can't lay all of this down at the feet of Da Man, rehashing tired old 50's-60's chesnuts about "Da Man keepin' po' folk down" is both fallacious and counterproductive. History is full of examples of put-upon minority populations which nevertheless succeed spectacularly. P'haps it has something to do with culture, or lack thereof in various populations - and it ain't the fault of "da man" either. If one's culture eulogizes professional athletes and criminals, that is all you are likely to produce. How many potential George Washington Carvers are ther out there? Why would we need this much peanut butter anyway?
High IQ is no guarantee of high Machiavellian intelligence , in many instances it can hamper your social skills.
There are many different forms of intelligence , being able to dazzle a crowd with a recitation of hamlet from memory , is not a guarantee that you could explain and understand string theory.
Sure IQ is a measure of your logical problem solving skills , problem is , there are very few logical people .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Now compare a typical low end job such as that, to other jobs. I'm caught in this tunnel of never ending job search. While I never trained in a real specific area of IT I can do a variety of things on a entry level from PC repair to admin management of a Windows enviroment to even something as simple as data entry. Yet the jobs I wouldn't be 'outclassed' or overqualified for, all require usually 3+ years experience and/or a BS from a 4 year school. Since I'm basically fresh out of my 2 year school, having learned my trade, I have less than a years experience at best, and I don't have the money for a 4 year school (and I've already tapped uncle sam for all the student loans he'd give me). But at the same time the "low end" jobs like data entry, or transcription, I can't get cause for whatever reasons, probably those you listed if I had to guess.
While not nesscarily racist per say, when you go into these low end job interviews and you're the only person of a particular race there out of a dozen people, doing it professionally as you were taught, it sure looks like racism on the end of the HR person. Maybe I've got rose colored glasses on, being a white person raised in the south, I never really had to deal with it much myself obviously. Thus it's strikingly new and unexpected. The funny part is I'd almost prefer if it was racism, at least then I know it was a personal prejudice that cost me a job rather than the fact the other interviewees who while may or may not be poor, still can't make themseles professionally presentable.
Aw Frell this
A BLACK SHERRIFF?! OT, but the Mel Brooks reference was too good to pass up.
right on, brother. i swear i'm not racist and have nothing but utmost admiration and respect for certain members of every race in existence.... but posts like his really rub me the wrong way. i too do not believe he is as smart as he brags himself up to be, and I found his post quite arrogant and pompous. I almost guarantee he has felt that he was racially discriminated against at times when he really just failed to acknowledge the real reason why things weren't happening as he would wish them to.
The trick is to act stupid. This works.
You look over a colleagues shoulder... he's made an obvious mistake in his logic - do *not* point it out to him (unless he asks, and even then pretend to think about it). Nobody can stand a smartass, especially if they really are smart...
Agreed. A sysadmin (or programmer, consultant, whatever) is there to solve business problems together with everyone else.
So what if the person you're talking to doesn't understand your job. They understand *their* job and it's up to you to listen to them because they may just have an idea that helps everyone.
If you go into conversations with a holier than thou attitude you'll not only be a crap sysadmin, you'll be convinced you're a really good one - and be shocked when you're pushed out on the next downsizing.
Marilyn Vos Savant's IQ is 190. That's the highest ever recorded. Perhaps that's where he got the number.
Even Einstein was only 161.
There are plenty of unemployed whites out there, and the colour of their skin doesn't change that at all.
You may have a certain advantage in some job situations because of the color of your skin, but so do plenty of other people - regardless of their color. There are some employers who want to hire blacks, latinos, asians, whites, cambodgeans, anything. And then there luckily are a huge number of employers who don't care too much, or who against their will care sub-consciously, but who manage to suppress that care, and just look at real merits.
There may be slightly more employers out there who want caucasians than other people, but at a job interview you can hardly be sure whether your skin color will make it more or less likely that you get the job.
Women complaining about a glass ceiling usually do so because they systematically see their male colleagues being promoted ahead of them even though they are less competent, more junior, less suited for the job, etc.
Certainly not because they don't move fast enough from janitor to CEO.
It has gotten better those recent years but it still has a long way to go...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I just wanted to add to your comment that our IT department is all black and they hire predominantly black people. There's a white intern.
It's a shame that you feel discriminated against, but there are two sides to the coin when it comes to playing the race card. I don't think that any black person is by nature less racist or any more virtuous than any white person.
What black people fight against these days amounts to less prejudice on how capable they are (as it was in the past) to a milder uneasiness based on stereotypes in pop culture.
IT hiring is done by people. ...
People are*ist.
Racist
Sexist
Ideologist
Nationalist
Ageist
To anybody who believes that human beings are or ever will be otherwise: "You're deluding yourself."
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
don't think eistein every really took a iq test
He no doubt has seen the influx of Indian immigrants. He has no doubt noticed the trend in Computer Science departments at universities accross the nation (hint: most of the kids in those majors are asian or Indian). You'll get a job based on Affirmative Action. Larger companies sometimes try to hire people in minority groups to "balance out" their staff. So you'll be the "token white guy" alongside the asians and Indians in the IT department. Your chances would only be better if you had been a white female.
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
(Note, as far as I know, MLK Jr. was not in favor of Affirmative Action).
My other first post is car post.
I would like this to be true, but I fear it is not, except in some very technical jobs. For management positions, on the other hand, you are worth what your corporation invests in training you, so the idea "We chose a very good guy" becomes a self-realizing motto.
This is not to say that racism will not disappear in the long run; it has already begun to; however it is probably going to take more generations that expected 20 years ago. Just my two cents.
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
Im a Dutchie working in the IT field as a systems-/networkadmin for a detaching agency. I've recently found that The Netherlands (which used to be known as *the* most open multicultural country) sadly still knows many racist streaks in IT.
:P
My current assignment is for the government of the largest city in The Netherlands, and there are several external IT-ers running around here. One of them was Indonesian (he became a private contracter and left), another is Turkish, one is a Brit and the rest is native Dutch. We all work in the IT departement and we lunch together every day, having the most interesting conversations. Eventually the topic of racism came up (Muslims are a hot topic in The Netherlands at the moment) and i was stunned to find out that the Turkish guy had actually changed his name to a more West-European one to have an easier time getting a job here!
He shared his experiences about how he had submitted 2 different resume's to the same jobopening and changing only his full name (his real name is very obviously foreign). The version with a typical Dutch name enthusiastically got invited for an interview while the original version of his resume got shot down almost instantly. Nothing else was changed, all the skills, education etcetera was all exactly the same on both resumes. This was not a one-time event tho. Both the Indonesian guy and the Turkish had similar experiences. They had also experienced the same reaction over the phone, so its not just a burocracy-thing. And this is supposed to be "the" multicultural nation?
The whole racial thing is such an alien concept to me, it apparently makes me naive
"Sarcasm is for *winners*, Alan." - Charlie Harper (Two and a Half Men)
If you really believe this, you should feel foolish.
If you are implying that the only solution in the prevention of discrimination is unreasonable behaviour, I'll have none of it, and would prefer to be considered discriminatory. It is impossible to correct a wrong, only to prevent it in the future.
Go cry somewhere else.
I dont think he is racist but i dont think he is doing something that is hurting the community of african americans and americans together.
I think he's just telling it like it is. There's that air of repressed geek angst to the post, but hey, this is Slashdot. Where would we be without our miserable childhoods complete with electronic succor?
I dont understand why african americans are seperating themselves from american in general.
They're not. They started out seperate to begin with and no one has bothered to try integration.
I live in a area where there are just as must black people as white, some times more. I have never seen racism take place in the work place or any other place.
You live in a fantasy world. Racism is real. Universal. It's as universal as theft, murder, alcoholism, bullying in schools, dangerous driving, tax dodgers, politicians, lawyers and obesity.
There will always be people in society who are racist. Societies have to work to reduce the amount of such people and the severity of their cases.
Racism has to be faced up to like any other social problem. You cannot assume that it is a construct of scoiety, though society can promote it. If you ignore it, it will either get worse, or stay the same, but it most likely will never, ever get better.
May the Maths Be with you!
Welcome to Slashdot.
May the Maths Be with you!
Wikipedia says that black people are the most dumb, and the hispanic. And that the asian and white are smartest!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligenc
White, black, green, orange, it doesn't matter.
I have never met a green or orange person. I'm worried that they might be offended by my surprise when I do.
May the Maths Be with you!
...you have two options. One way is to ask the mountain to move. The other option is to go around it. What I constantly admire about achievers is that they are smart enough not to bash their heads against immovable objects or deadends but to explore and pursue doggedly, opportunities that allow them to display their strengths. If there is a glass ceiling above you and it is not breakable or movable, then you MOVE or be broken.
;P
We should not make the mistake of looking back from our death beds and realizing that we have wasted so much time cursing every injustice, unfairness and discrimination that came our way. Finally, regretting that we should have instead focused those time on other opportunities, hobbies, families, friends, etc. Well, we still might not achieve anything great in the end......but at least we didn't carry the burden of negativity with us for 60, 70 or 80 years of our life till our last breath. I believe strongly that not having to go through life with any negativity is in itself a wonderful and rare achievement. Unfortunately, this achievement is not news-worthy and most of us are just not interested in it
Reality is what we taste, smell, see, hear and touch yet we cannot comprehend it...only approximate it.
Women complaining about a glass ceiling usually do so because they systematically see their male colleagues being promoted ahead of them even though they are less competent, more junior, less suited for the job, etc.
In their opinion. What person passed over for a promotion ever believes that the one who got it was better than themselves?
Men see other men (and women) promoted ahead of them, too. It happens all the time.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
...that you get passed over because people can't stand you, not because you're black, but because you're suffering from delusions of grandeur and display all the insufferable personality traits that accompany said delusions?
I wouldn't hire you, not because you're incompetent, but because your technical skills would not be valuable enough to pay for the cleaning bill when your colleagues beat your face into the carpet.
You're a genius. Whoopy-doo. You're also an arrogant twat, and there's enough of those already.
I would like to know if you're white or black, since I suspect that would have an influence on your opin ion when posting a reply such as yours.
Lets face it folks, racism is a convenient little slight of hand to distract us from the real issue: All forms of predudice and nepotism are excersized with fervent corporate superiority. "White" and "male" don't mean jack shit without the rest of the checklist. Yeah sexy, its "Rush Week" at the IT geek fraternity, and if you're a hint frumpy, stiff, unattractive, low class, foreign, inferior, boorish, unstylish, old, political, emotional, totally honest, run of the mill, poor, awkward, uncomedic, unmysterious, un-better than the rest of the lowlife "ordinary" humans that are (actual loser) good-for-nothing but the future solyent green supply.....If you are anything "different" than ideal perfection, in every respect, arbitrarily conceived..... then we'll just jerk you around until we come up with a preferable specimen. What the nazis were did with test tubes and chemicals, corporate america accomplishes with an HR dept and a job opening. Social engineering reinforces the master race's neccesity of exstreme prejudice at all times. This is what makes us #1. Thats why we're better than the rest. Whather or not this distiction is aimed at race is unimportant - its aimed at whatever threatens my security and dominance. Ultimately - Its aimed at whatver it can hit with spit. "We're an equal opportunity "descriminator" but lets start with any rationalization we can invent. The fact is that all forms of prejudice are implemented with an abiding commitment to the "corporate culture" that is being fostered by the "Chosen Ones". Its just another darwinian pyramid scheme we call jungle living. We'll just pretend that we've actually evolved and no longer aspire to our personal survival and exceess comforts in a world of scarcity. When it comes down to it there is'nt a skin color or law invented that will protect you from human nature.
Ah, I'm from Northern Ireland, where everyone is Green or Orange. We never really had any other colors when I was growing up: cf Joyce - "Ireland never had any problems with the Jews because she never let them in in the first place"
Though sadly it appears, from recent incidents, that now that we are starting to get people of different colors, we're perfectly capable of being horrible to them too. It's sort of like a feature upgrade - "Wow, now you can get people to discriminate against that come in easy-to-identify colors"
I've always had a problem with understanding racism because I simply cannot get myself into a mindset where I can see why you would ever judge someone on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
>>Well, I would assume a Chinese student would have even worse problems understanding an accented Pakistani than you would.
>And why would that be? In my experience, that's not true. Don't stereotype people like that.
There's a place, called Donegal. According to official records, people speak english there. I assure you that if you had a conversation with someone from there, barring you are also from Donegal, you will have serious difficulties understanding them.
I can only imagine the true incomprehesible horror of being a non english speaker and being faced with a lecturer speaking in a Donegal accent. I can only just understand them if they speak slowly, but a lot of these guys speak quickly, flambouyantly, and with heavy dosages of colloquialisms too.
In recent years, this has gotten better, with more younger Donegalians picking up a "Mid-Atlantic" accent, from television and radio. Still, it gives one a new appreciation on the evolution and divergence of languages.
May the Maths Be with you!
Immigrant problems != racism.
Canada is hell for many immigrants, that's true. Guess what; I'd rather emigrate to Canada than just about anywhere else in the world.
I used to travel a lot for my work and have covered most of North America. Most of Canada is better than most of the States, by and large, in its treatment of minorities. In the area where I live (Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge) the population is becoming quite mixed. Everybody gets along with everybody else and mixes. Just go out on the street and look around; especially on Friday night when the university students are out. The groups are mixed. Race is the last thing on anybody's mind.
Your statement that Canada is way worse than the United States is at least ill informed.
That's either utter bullshit or your HR staff is stupid (either is entirely possible, so this isn't stictly speaking an attack on you). Deliberately selecting a group based on ethnicity for hiring/firing is patently illegal. If employment decisions were carried out explicitly based on such recommendations, then the white people would have grounds a very successful lawsuit against your company.
Hey, how much progress has been made anywhere? I'd thought some...but then I was stunned to hear from a friend of mine... a male of true African descent who happened to be born into an otherwise very white family (don't ask) in the U.S., raised in the white burbs, well-educated with an MBA (well, some would argue that's an oxy-moron), cultured, etc. etc...and he often would be (and still is) subjected to racism based on what could only have been the colour of his skin - that was the *only* thing about him which was different from anyone else from that same background. An interesting observation was made by one of the ranters over at Indignation.org, where he talks about being in Mississippi for MLK day a few years ago. He says "I looked at this as an opportunity to get a glimpse into one of the most important tragic events in our national history, and planned to go down to Beale Street for the evening celebration. When I asked a few people (white people) about parking and other logistics, they all said, "Oh, you don't want to go down there tonight. Trust me." They didn't elaborate, but I could smell the fear and mistrust. Their eyes said, "If you, a white man from out of town, go down there tonight, you will be a target." (That full rant is at http://www.indignation.org/mlk-day-observed.)
I'm going to begin this with a tangent, but I'll come back to the point.
I've been accused of racism and sexism - twice - when dealing with those who worked for me.
In the first case, guy knew his stuff when it came to coding. Guy also sat in my boss' office for 30 minutes telling him that the rest of the team were idiots; he wasn't going to comply with our standards as he disagreed with them; he wanted to rebuild our architecture to the Newest! Greatest! technology (at the time, Struts had just come out. We weren't using it yet. We agreed that we should keep an eye on it, but we were damned if we were going to rebuild an existing - and working - application that took 1 million hits a day and had been for a year)
The director gave the guy enough rope, and then walked him to the door with the comment that I was right, the guy wasn't working out as far as team chemistry.
He ranted that I was racist against Hispanics.
The second time I had someone working for me who the rest of the team had nicknamed 101, as that person was stuck at the 101 level no matter how much the team worked with her. There were various issues (lack of ability to pick up concepts; inability to design or architect; a strange ability to blow away other people's changes in version control no matter how many times the version control admin sat down with her to work with her; etc.) - so I explained to my boss that 101 just wasn't working out. I was encouraged to keep 101 because "there aren't any other females on the team" and "we need to work with her; she wants to be in the technical field and there aren't enough women in technical fields."
On one day I discovered that not only had 101 blown away some changes in a remote corner of the app, but then full testing on that piece hadn't been examined and the removal of those changes had made it to production. The language I used was...colorful. I did not use the C-word (I'm married - I know better. The C-word is a week on the couch) or the female dog word. I used the words "stupid wench." (Everyone please forgive me. It was Friday afternoon at 3 PM and it had been a long week, but now I'm making excuses) 101 went to the boss and complained about my sexist attitude. Despite evidence to the contrary, she said she had not done it. I was called on the carpet. It was explained to me that I was supposed to be mentoring 101 so that she could improve as we were encouraging females to be in the field and it would be difficult for her to improve if she felt I had a hostile attitude. I decided it was time for me to move to another job and I did so. (and this is petty of me, but I just want to mention that a week after I left, she blew away some changes again, and again tried to deny it. Except that this time there was more of an audit trail.)
My point?
It might not be others, although I suspect some of it could be (just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not coming to get you. Seriously, using the examples above, 101 was right - the rest of the team couldn't stand her - she was just wrong as to the root cause. It wasn't her sex. She was just a pain in the ass to work with) But some of it might be you and how you do things. Others here have said the same thing to you. Give it some thought.
I don't know a lot about this, but I have heard that recently two potential candidates were "turned down by HR" for a job in India. My co-workers who know a bit more about the situation are leaning towards the idea that it is caste related.
Can anyone shed some light on the caste system in modern India?
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Being old doesn't mean you're obsolete. I'm older than you're father and I'm still considered technical by people who know me and by some leading researchers in one of my specialties. Unfortunately, they're not hiring managers. Part of the problem is my skills are too esoteric to be understood by ordinary programmers and I can't get a research position because I don't have a graduate degree (degree bias). When I started programming, a B.A. was considered an advanced degree for the programming field.
But what I find most amazing about age bias in general, is that younger workers don't think it's their problem. Not because they too will get old eventually. But because it hasn't occurred to them who is going to support their elders. If older workers can't support themselves or build up retirement savings, younger workers will be paying higher taxes to support them. Say hello to higher taxes for me.
Not all Africans come from Africa.
Now I know how Canadians feel.
I agree. Anyone who points out his/her IQ score without being directly asked is almost always full of themselves and has some sort of social skill problem that at the very least makes them believe they are better than everyone else. It was a very interesting rant, and I can completely see why some of his coworkers have a problem with him. He is right so many times, and always makes sure to shove it in their face by proving to them why he is right, instead of showing them where they went wrong and trying to teach them something. Nobody learns by having their ideas shot down time and time again. So all they want to do is prove him wrong, even once, and they will continue to be pissed at him until he learns not to treat them this way, or he gets his come-uppance. I worked with someone like this, and he had such a big problem when someone smarter than him actually proved him wrong on a conference call with the department that he physically threatened the person and was fired. All because he can't take criticism and didn't have good social skills for knowing how to work with people.
As for the IQ score thing, I was once tested by a psychologist working on her graduate degree. I was also around 12 at the time. She told me that to obtain a true IQ score, you would never rely on a single result, so in order to claim that you have an IQ of 190 you would have to be tested by at least 2 different people at two different times, preferably with multiple methods. She also told me that they were taught never to tell a child their IQ score as it can adversely affect them whether it is good or bad. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about that.
In this job, my boss is a woman, and one of my 5 co-workers is India. At least half of the workers in my building are non-white, and some non-american. I am contracted through a company and everyone I have delt with is Indian.
In my last job, about a quarter of my co-workers were black.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
caucasian - 'white'
So, that's what caucasian means.
I guess that I've been filling those forms out incorrectly for years now.
Who else refers to themselves as "Continent-Country"?
Or should I give up and go with the flow... Im a "North American-German"?
I agree. The rebutle was an ironic attempt to tell the "Black sysdamin" that a better way to show intelligence, is to use above average language, like the author was doing boastfully. Meanwhile, Shadowruni was making a point that iaminthetrunk totally missed.
ayottesoftware.com
just because you watch chris rock specials doesnt put you in touch with blacks. give me a break shay whitey.
Some time ago, while I was visiting a friend in SF, we were talking in spanish between us when another co-worker came in told us: Hey! You are in "America", speak in english!
Note that he wasn't there when we were talking, we weren't lefting him out of it.
Guess, some people forget that they live in San Francisco and some time ago spanish was the main language in that city, same with Los Angeles, etc.
"Young and energetic" translates into "no family responsibilites", "naive", "able to work long hours", "devotes all of self to job."
I work in a small small-biz consulting firm and the first engineer they hired (I'm #5) was divorced and lived in an apartment. The spoken and unspoken assumption about getting certs for new products and/or anything else that doesn't seem like billable work is "..Dan did it."
Well sure he did. Dan doesn't have to mow a lawn, feed a 16 month old, or most any other responsibilities, and this is what employers want -- somebody who is essentially a 24/7 employee.
Older employees have family responsibilities and homes, and they often have also grown old enough to have other interests as well as gaining some perspective beyond their job interests, and thus are less willing to play 24/7 employee.
I don't have any newspaper account of such things, but if you're interested, I can share a personal account with you instead.
A friend of mine was up for a promotion at her workplace (incidentally not in the IT industry). She was told by her manager that there weren't any other realistic candidates for the position and she was sure to get it. However, the person named ended up being another woman, who not only worked in a different department, but did not even have a college degree (stated as one of the minimum requirements for the position). My friend was shocked and confused.
Eventually, she learned from her manager that the other woman was black, and had threatened to sue under the Equal Opportunity Act if not given the job. She probably would not have won, but the company did not have the resources to defend itself against such a lawsuit, so they gave in to her demands.
As many people have already stated, discrimination is discrimination regardless of who is practicing it, or whom they are practicing it against. The sad fact is, you cannot legislate racism out of existence. The EOCC levels the playing field only in the sense that it facilitates racism for everybody, instead of just the majority.
Just for giggles, though, let's review.
So, where's the knee-jerk? Perhaps more to the point, why argue with someone who agreed with your self-professed hair-trigger post?
for those of you living in such areas that you feel your school or your workplace place any value in the color of someone's skin. there are many black, asian, and eastern european students in my computer science classes, and when language permits, we all get along.
Trout's epitaph: Life is no way to treat an animal.
I see that stuff happen all of the time in my current job among people of the same color. It is about big egos propping up weak self esteem
American IT firms have shown they have no problems hiring people of color ( mostly Indians on H1-Bs ) if the price is right.
I guess this wouldn't be racist, just a factor of Equal Opportunity.. One time as a junior engineer with a good technical sense I was asked to interview a candidate to gauge their "technical merrit". I did this and aksed so tough questions (I kept a list of questions, like a test, that I used on interviews). As it turns out, this guy could not cut it, so I scored him low on my review sheet. Turns out my tech lead did too. A day later the program manager called us both up and asked why we scored this candidate so low, as if we were being racist... The candidate was a mexican-american... Our PM said flat out, "do you know how hard it is to find a mexican-american engineer?". He then handed us back our yellow review sheets. We knew what to do. Gave him a 4 out of 5. His original score was a 2... I was young, and got a real lesson there, don't know what it was, but it did make me a bit mad. I for one like to have in depth, multiple phone interviews and have fact based questions that I can score to determine technical merrit and personality. Then I call for a face-to-face (usually I have made up my mind), and several times the person who showed up was not whitey, and I recommended them be hired "anyway". The phone is great way to avoid the issue, especially if you spend some time customizing your interviewing skill.
IMHO, you have to seek the job in order to show an interest in the job. I don't believe that there are many blacks, women, or hispanics that are interested in doing what we do.
When I was in college, there was one black in our CCNA courses, and he was very discouraged. The instructor constantly asked him to use proper english and to purchase a belt. He eventually left the class, as well as the college. Nobody was to blame but himself, as he could not conform.
I think that part of the racial debate that we fail to recognize is the fact that white people are discouraged to say anything negative about blacks and hispanics, yet on the other side of the coin, the same is not true. Be black, wear a black power shirt, no problem. Be white, wear a white power shirt... That is the reason most of you posted as anonymous cowards.
I am eagerly awaiting the affirmitive action crowds to make a feeble attempt to dumb our choice of work down, by mandating that we hire people with little skill for much money simply because they fall into a racial or gender category. Say it won't happen, but if it can happen to hospitals, it can happen anywhere.
And yes, coming from a "Scottish-Irish-American", I invite the comments of my poorly written, unsympathetic rant... Especially from Mexican-Europeans and Chinese-Africans.
DISCLAIMER:
I don't believe what I write, and neither should you.
I think it's obvious, based just on the accounts and responses here that there is a problem with some minorities exploiting their position. I have personally seen it although not been a victim of it. I once worked at a shop where, without warning, all the black workers failed to show up for work on MLK day even though it was not a paid holiday. It was a significant percentage of people and hurt the company like a small strike. Yet there were no consequences for these workers because the company was too afraid of being called racist. If you want a published example, look at the New York Firemen who sued the city for firing them and replacing them with less qualified blacks. They won because it was real and it's still racism.
What strikes me the most though, is how those who post here saying they have been the victims of reverse-racism in hiring and promotion, are quickly shouted down. If we want progress on this issue, then BOTH sides have to be willing to admit that there are problems, and it's NOT one sided.
I met a white guy once whose name was Darius. About my age (early 30s now). His dad was a history buff and named him after the Persian king. He worked in IT.
... I'd say it still happens, yeah.
Once, for his job, he had to go be a liason for a brief period at another company. As it happened, this other company was one where he had applied for a job but hadn't gotten an interview the previous year. He liked the job he ended up getting, so he had no hard feelings.
Somehow the fact that he had applied at this other company came up when he was on-site. The person he was working with was actually one of the people who had reviewed his resume. "Oh, yeah, I remember you!" he said. "See, we thought you were black because of your name. Ha ha! If we had know, we probably would have given you an interview."
It's only one data point, but
jf
I don't want to play devil's advocate here, but I don't think you can estimate his IQ level based on his use of language in all cases.
Don't get me wrong: I know it's possible to do this, I just think that if english was his 4th language and he started learning a little while ago, there's a good chance his use of it and his eloquence is not what you would expect from a high IQ-score.
While the use of language or vocabulary knowledge might be useful when estimating, you should know a little about his background first. For example, Spanish is my first language, I also studied german, japanese and english.
I took an english IQ test and scored 147, and if it was my first language it'd have truly helped.
In any case, having a high-iq doesn't mean that you'll be able to use it at its fullest, an accordingly high emotional intelligence is needed.
To dumb it down:
The intelligence IQ is a wheelbarrow, our emotional intelligence is our strength. If the wheelbarrow is too big and we don't have enough strength to roll it, a smaller wheelbarrow might be more adecuate.
Professor: "But, what about your super-intelligence?"
Gunther: "When I had that there was too much pressure to use it. All I want out of life is to be a monkey of moderate intelligence who wears a suit. That's why I've decided to transfer to business school!"
Professor: "Noooooooooo!"
20% of the time:
(They're so impressed they break into Japanese!)
Cough. Cough.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
...I work at a company in which I am the only white male in the IT department. In fact the only person who isn't black is a woman.
If anything this is evidence of reverse discrimination.
I work with Indians, Pakistanis, blacks, women. Our office is still probably about 50% white male, but there's a lot of the others also.
"Politicians always tell the truth, when they're calling each other liars."
I'll just say this- If you are white and interviewing for a non-managerial tech job, if the person that the position reports into is foreign - just turn around and walk right out the dooor. Don't waste your time. The whole time he's just thinking about you chumming with the VP about the golf trophy on your desk, and how the VP never stops to ask about the statue of Ganesh on his. You could nail every question, but you never had a chance. Not trying to be inflammatory, just trying to shed some light on an equally disturbing, but less visible issue.
The same ignorance and stupidity that was problematic for Dr. King still exists today, as it has existed since people have walked the earth and among other animals before humans. If it is less acceptable to exclude people simply because of their race, gender or sexual orientation, then we are making progress, but that will not remove people's prejudices. It's not even a southern/northern thing. Ghettos in northern cities are matched by slums in the south. And this is the problem that needs to be addressed. It is economic inequality that perpetuates racism and hatred more than anything. Dr. King and businessmen like Bob Johnson (and his equally intelligent ex-wife) know that it is only by creating economic opportunity for those who are disadvantaged that anything will change. It's a tough road, obviously, because the very prejudices we hold are what keep us from providing those very opportunities.
He said, white or black GUY. (women need not apply?)
If I had grown up in an area where there were a large number of poor purple people, then I might well have associated purple people with being poor. If poor people committed most crimes, then I might have associated purple people with being criminals. Once someone has built up these group images it is very difficult to overcome them, particularly when the media tries hard to reinforce them so hard.
I don't wish to condone racism in any way, but I think it's important that it is more fully understood. For many people, I suspect it is highly subconscious, and if we treat it as a treatable psychosis it is far more likely that it can be cured than if we treat it as a conscious evil choice.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
a) recruiter was an ass
b) numerous white programmers & network engineers are unemployed, hence "white" means jack shit
c) a lot has to do with regions, where you live...perhaps the above is true in deep south. But in the northeast an african IT professional is much more likely to be hired over a caucasian.
Just out of curiosity, are there any other forms of compensatory steps you can imagine that could be taken rather than affirmative action? I am actually in favor of AA, but I am also wary of a compensatory step that is fundamentally rooted in the same race-based identification (albeit as a final step post-qualification analysis) that got us into the situation to begin with.
I am half Iranian.
:) )
Among Iranians basically the most respected profession is to be a doctor. If you can't cut it as a doctor (no pun intended), then the next best thing is to be an Engineer. Computer Science falls in the Engineer side of things (culturally speaking).
I'm sure other societies have similar cultural pressures. I don't think it is a coincidence that so many Chineese, Indonesian, Pakistani, or Indian people chose to become IT professionals. I'm sure culture pushes them in that direction to some extent.. in a quest for a "respectable profession".
I'm half white american (European descent). On this side of the family hard work matters most. What you do exactly doesn't seem as important (as I interpret it).
But I wonder if there are similar pressures in the African American community. Possibly there the "respectable" professions are more along the lines of law and education (just guessing really).
My third half is Latino (I grew up and have lived most my life in Latin America).
Among the upper class in this community the most important thing is social status. You can obtain social status by having degrees, lots of degrees are great, money helps too. So choices could be made in this direction. Being a doctor is good, being an engineer is respectable, but being a business god is best. (Lawyers are often seen as corrupt
In the US (I studied and worked there many years) I went to a University in the Northwest. There were exactly 2 black people out of 300 people in the Computer Science and Engineering program. Naturally the workforce was similarly devoid of black people. I had one very good friend who was black and worked in IT.. he was a real tech enthusiast and was very good. I met a guy in college (who wasn't in the computer science program) who was a real computer hacker (I met him in my Persian class.. ). I also worked with another guy at IBM.. but didn't get to know him much.
So if the educational system isn't producing a lot of black computer professionals.. how can company's hire them??
Conclusion: the problem is very deep
Uh, I'm white and this is how I'm treated. Welcome to IT, please check your IQ ego at the door.
I claim that black people suffer from racial discrimination, and that compensatory steps need to be taken.
;->) it. My point is that discrimination for or against a person based on thier race is ALWAYS wrong. My purpose in posting was to point out that white people do get discriminated against in the name of "affirmative action", and despite you disbelief that such a thing had ever been reliably been reported, there are in fact news stories, court cases, and claims lodged with the EEOC demonstrating same.
:-P
You claimed (or strongly implied) that white people didn't suffer from (reverse) discrimination. I chose to point out that you were wrong.
You (curiously) refuse to make any statement about racism; given that you are interested in talking about affirmative action, I find that strange.
Given that I posted merely to address your claim (or implication) listed above, there was no need to talk about race or racism in general. Sorta makes the discussion loose focus. I find it strange that you think one would need to talk about the state of race or racism in general in order to take the position that discriminating for ("affirmative action" as it has been used in this thread - though NOT it's origional meaning) or against someone is bad. It's one of those "principle" things....
Given that you are making sweeping statements about whether or not we should have affirmative action, I find it rather presumptuous.
Yes, you find it presumptuous that I think that we should not discriminate for or against a person on the basis of thier race. Got it. 'Cuz it's not discrimination if it leads to your preferred outcome. I find it presumptuous for you to advocate outcome-based discrimination (your "compensitory solution").
If there was no racism, I strongly agree with you that affirmative action would be wrong.
Discrimination for or against a person based on thier race is ALWAYS wrong. That was the whole point of the legitimate civil rights movement.
Racism exists in America,...
You continue to to make this claim. Despite the fact that I have not argued against (or for
Sorry, I'm not going to get into a "racism exists in America" discussion. Especially not the "thousands of subtle effects" type. It would lack focus, and be without a point. I'll stick to the more limited "discrimination based on (any) race is bad, mkay?" position.
My race is totally irrelevant to whether it is bad to discriminate based on (any) race. Likewise the experiences of my friends.
As for me suggesting that you're racist, I didn't; I don't actually believe you are racist, just naieve.
Again, with the assigning positions to me which I have never taken. I wonder why you feel the need to do so...
For the record, I never claimed that you suggested I was racist. You assigned a set of positions to me: "You see only the bad consequences of a culture attentive to racism in society. You don't see the gains we've made." I pointed out that I had never taken those, or any other positions in regards to racism in society in general.
The first conflating of my name with the epithet of "racist" occured in your post to which this is a reply. Again, I wonder why you felt the need to do so...
As for being naive, given that I have made no statements about racism or race relations in America, it is interesting that you draw that conclusion. Unless, of course, by "naive" you mean that I don't "realize" that discrimination is good if it leads to the desired "compensitory result."
You may have been one of the people posting as "Anonymous Coward", however, in which case I suggest not taking offense.
I may have been, but was not. I post under my own ID, or I don't bother. thankyouverymuch. Interesting that you chose to throw out another non-relevant red herring. The "people like you caused the french riots" one was at least amusing.
BTW, HAD I also posted
"If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone."
~Epictetus
In the various companies I have worked for in and around Birmingham I've worked with a lot of black and asian ( probably more asian ) people with IT related degrees. Thinking about though I'd say that the helpdesk probably had more asians than caucasians, and technical support was roughly split between caucasians and asians. There were one or two asian managers and a couple of black people in HR but these roles seemed to be predominantly white.
Obviously this is just company amongst millions and is probably not representative.
Dr. Phil? What are you... retarded?
but I never had the opportunity to just exclusively go to school and not work
I can't get over this complaint, regardless of who makes it. I'm a white kid from a middle-class family in the midwest and I never had the opportunity to just exclusively go to school and not work. I have also been continously employed with by at least on job since I was 14, working an average of 15 hours/week (the legal max) while I was in primary/secondard school and over 30 hours/week while in college. I also took out tens of thousands of dollars in loans (for which *everyone* is qualified) to pay for my college education. You're not special just because your daddy didn't pay for school.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been passed over many times for being a caucasian male. Companies diversity scores are now a factor that management believes needs to be tracked, and "improved".
In my particular company, I've seen a job opening posted, and it's only people that can add to the diversity score that are asked back for a second interview, even at the cost of getting a lower skilled worker. I've had to actually at times work 1.5x or 2.0x to pick up the slack. I've now left that particular department, but the overall idea that Diversity is just as as important as job performance has lead me to believe that it's really time to leave the whole company. They aren't going to survive with that mentality.
A high diversity score != good company performance.
For a different slant on the topic, (and this is not me plugging a product) check out the book _Blink_. In summary, we (people), in a somewhat subconscious manner and fashion, are not comfortable with other people who are not like us, or with whom we do not have any experience.
Take for example, (I am using specific terms for the sake of the example) an entire neighborhood of African-American (black or consistently dark skinned folk). They are much more likely to trust people who are look, sound, act . . . etc . . . like them. And, this trust is actually deeply rooted in their own subconscious likes, dislikes, and experiences.
This is not racism, which is rooted in a conscious belief that race makes someone better or worse than another. Race makes us different. And, differences makes us more or less uncomfortable, based upon our experiences with people who are different in like ways.
Now, this does not do the book _Blink_ justice. But, in summary, are we comfortable with people who are different than most IT and other people in an office, _in_any_manner_ . . . and would that comfort level influence our decision to hire someone.
From my myopic view, ageism is a bigger problem. I was let go from a major computer company during one of their endless rounds of happysizing at the age of 48. With 25+ years of experience and a willingnes to take on almost anything, it still took three years to get back into IT. I learned to loath the word 'overqualified'! That is just a code for "we think you'll charge too much". I'm back working for a good company (at 3/5th of my former
salary). Beats working retail.
Even the title to this posting is biased: "Is there STILL racism..." I didn't know there WAS any racism going on. Did you? Just because a field is dominated by a certain type of person does not imply that there is a single solitary shred of any "ism" going on.
If someone can PROVE that there is or was racism going on in the I.T. field at large, then I'd like to see the proof. Come on, you're geeks, so prove it!
Before someone spouts that I am some sort of bigoted Rush Limbaugh republican, I'm not. I'm quite the opposite.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Mods: Mark parent "funny", please.
A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in an election.
"What is without doubt it that there is a subculture of white people who have gained and retain a significant advantage in the workplace on account of their race"
And who built the "workplace"? Yes, our dear old friend, the white male...
You have a lot of thinking to do.
I'm posting anonymously becuase I can provide a very real example but don't want attribution. My mother is a director of Human Resources at a major company and there was a minority worker who consistently performed poorly. This worker failed QC all the time and most of her work was returned or had to be redone by other employees. Because of regulatory requirements, my mother was forced to document all of these problems for several months before she could fire this person. When the person was finally fired, my mother was immediately accused of racism and sexism (despite the obvious fact that my mother is a woman). She literally has to bend over backwards to fire a minority because of all the paperwork involved. She's had to spend hours learning laws and she's had to take numerous tests to verify that she can comply with all the requirements for firing someone who is a minority. So while this isn't a "newspaper account" this is one instance I know of personally.
And we usually don't have to try hard. *zing!*
There's the case of my girlfriend's employer. They had an employee who decided she didn't like her work schedule, so she stopped coming to work. Because she was black it took 6 months of meetings, finally agreeing to change her schedule to something she wanted, and then another 3 months of putting up with her terrible job performance before they had enough to fire her. 9 months they paid her because she was black. Another cow-orker missed 2 days of work and was fired right away. He was white.
You ask for documentation but really this sort of stuff is in a lot of large companies and not getting documented at all because the same people terrified of a civil rights lawsuit are also terrified the overly qualified white guy they just turned down in favor of a mediocre black guy will sue as well. It's all ridiculous and it's all because of the current laws.
I've been an IT Manager for over 15 years and in that time have hired many people for IT positions with three companies.
I have never had an African or Native American job applicant (that I know of) and I've had very few (<5%) female applicants. I have had applicants with a wide range of ethnicities and sexual orientations.
That is sad, but I don't know who to blame; the true list would probably be too long to fathom.
start a hobby.
If your IQ is still 190, the chances are you aren't going to fit in... whatever your skin colour.
Especially since the Guinness World Record holder for the highest IQ, Marilyn vos Savant, has an IQ of 186. You'd think that someone with a score of 190 would be smart enough to use a number lower than the world record holder so it wouldn't be so obvious that they are just making it up.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
"then the white people would have grounds a very successful lawsuit against your company."
Why? The company would simply say it was trying to cater to the blacks. That is the objective, isn't it? I mean, we're not racist here....
You have a lot of thinking to do.
I'm originaly from the North (Wisconsin) and up there everyone is White, but there is no racism (unless you are in the inner city). If you are walking down the street and a hispanic or black crosses your path its like (wow, don't see many of them around). But that's as far as it goes. I have yet to hear anyone up north make a bad comment about how the minority groups work, intellegence, etc. Then I moved to the south. What a switch. It's not quite so bad here in east Texas, but South-East US, it really bad when it commes to racism. If it's anywhere from name calling to out right hate it's totally different. One thing I heard a preacher say the other day that really hit my heart. Sure we may not like racism, and we may not have "colored" busses and restrooms anymore, but what more are we doing? Sure most of use whites on this forum may not hold any mallice to the blacks, but why is it that most blacks are still in the poverty level? You could say that it is part of their choice. Drugs, etc. But I say what are we doing to help them out? In essence we are still a very racist country, but our sin is not a sin of commission but of omission. It's not what we do, but what we don't do. That being said. If I was hiring jobs, skin color doesn't matter. Confidence and knowledge is everything.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
A lot of jobs in IT happen because of networking. For my first IT job, there wasn't exactly an opening -- they weren't actively looking for someone -- but I personally knew the manager, and he had a bit of flexibility since it was part-time. I got the job strictly on my merits, but my social connections were what got my foot in the door.
People tend to socialize with their own ethnicity. There need not be anything inherently racist about this (though there sometimes is) but it means that white people tend to know white people. If white people are the ones already working in IT, then other white people are going to be the ones who get the leads, personal recommendations, etc. This will take a very long time to equilibrate, and is in my opinion a very good justification for affirmative action *recruiting* policies.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
As a white 'caucasian' sixteen year old white male I started working for a small whitebox OEM company. My responsibilities included building the systems, installing Windows, performing the burn-in, and troubleshooting. When I came to work at the company I had a pretty big head on my shoulders. I thought there was nothing that was unsolvable for me to tackle and I could get to a solution in half the time it took other technicians. Until... I was handed a network issue at one of the client sites. I tried for two weeks to solve the issue exhausting everything solution I could think of. It finally came down to making it work or for the company pulling out of the deal so they sent me one day to meet-up with one of the head field technicians -- Dwight.
Dwight was an older blackman and he worked (and still does) in one mode, slow. When we began working together it fustrated me so much because he would take his (and my) precious time doing EVERYTHING. Even waiting on him to click the mouse could be excruciatingly painful for me a times. So let me say that patience is greatest value this man taught me, but more importantly he taught me how to think out problems before acting. Dwight has a determination to exhaust all possibilities before putting a practical and definitive solution into motion. Whereas most technicians, programmers, and just people in general will go into a situation with all their guns blazing using trail-and-error attacks until they get the appropriate response Dwight will methodically plan out his attack until he is sure it is going to work (for the long term).
Needless to say, in a matter of hours Dwight had the network up and going according to the client's specifications and after teaching this new pup a thing or two. This was only the beginning. Over the next two years Dwight taught me a lot about being a good technician but more importantly a good problem solver not only with computers but in life in general.
Today the values and traits Dwight taught me are still with me today as a software engineer. It has been six years since I was under his mentorship full time. Today if I had a problem in either a technical matter or a personal matter I know he is there to teach me. I have not learned as much from my peers, superiors, or college professors as much as I have from him. Besides my parents he will always be one of the greatest people who influence my life.
I know companies are out there who would not hire Dwight because of his color, age, and now he has a few medical problems which require regular care. To me this is ludicris because if he could teach some of the guys I have worked with in the past half as much as what he taught me it would be a grand investment.
Fuck, I'd hire somebody with green skin if they had the qualifications, were an efficient worker and nice to be around. I'd also fire somebody with green skin if I kept getting complaints. You shouldn't be able to sue your employer just because YOU'RE incompetent, that's just stupid.
It's never just a game when you're winning. - George Carlin
I have worked in the IT field for 15 years, first as a Mainframe then Java Developer and have worked for 3 fortune 100 companies. I once had a manager ask me (despite my great college grades) "We have never run across a black person who was able to pick things up so quickly, how can we find more like you.". In her mind successful black people were an anomaly. Also, on interviews I have had managers actually question my experience and in one instance a manager said (after figuring out that I knew what I was doing) said to me during my review "You had a great year, I never expected that you would be able to handle all of what we threw at you". When I asked for clarification he commented that he had never had any association with Black people and that he was worried that he had misjudged my talent level.
In closing, I think that racisim exists in the industry, I have seen Whites get a loooong leash while their Black counterparts get dinged at every turn. The key is that some (I repeat SOME) managers when they see a person of color automatically assume that that person is brilliant, an idiot, not capable of doing the job or whatever. And that most of the time the only interaction that they have with people of a different race is at work or (god forbid) television.
Yeah, I was gonna call bullshit on his post, too. There's a bit too much Star Trek type tech lingo in it.
I'd like to call bullshit on this post like a couple of other people have. Not that I think that the poster is lying, but I think that a large portion of discrimination is imagined because minorities are conditioned to think people are going to discriminate against them.
I've a personal example of this - myself. I grew up in a rural area where it wasn't hard to be of above average intellegence. Both my parents and my grand-parents are intellegent people and knew that education wasn't just school, but experiance. So they took me to art galleries, museums, their jobs, etc... so I could experiance things outside of my day to day life. Most of the kids I grew up with didn't have these oppertunities, so in addition to being of above average intellegence I was also fairly cosmopolitan. This pretty much made me an outcast. Further, because of my appitite for music I was listening to all kinds of stuff that kids in my area had never heard of (mainly old punk and industrial). I tended to dress in a manner similar to the fashion that these bands displayed in an area where wrangler jeans and cowboy boots was the norm. Yet another reason for persecution. By the time I got to college I had such a persecution complex that I was sure that everyone I met that was different than me was going to be close-minded and would hate me. It took me a while of living in the real world to realize that this simply isn't true and that people weren't reacting to my mode of dress or my intellegence, but rather my eliteism and my attitude.
The gentleman-parent-poster seems to suffer from the same affliction. In the movies people that are smart and persecuted tend to become mad scientists. In the real world they just become assholes.
Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps this genetleman lives in a small town and works for a small company where he really is the smartest person and all his co-workers and dumb racist rednecks. But I have one question about that. If this man is so smart and able, why isn't he surrounding himself with the same kind of people? If he's as good as he says he is, he would be working in a large company that LOVES intellegence and is blind to skin color.
Another personal example. The company I work for, which is very large and multi-national, has a very diverse technical staff. The networking group, for example, has only one white man in it. The rest are black Americans, a black jamacian, a gentleman from turkey, and an asian American. We have Chinese, Korean, an Angolan, Sweads, Russians, 2 Iranians (both women who both wear veils), Turks, Indians and a myriad of other people. My boss is a black man. His boss is a white woamn. Our VP is a black woman. We're mostly male, but we have the largest percentage of women in any IT department I've ever worked for.
If you're concentrating on race or any other minor thing that makes you "different" or another person "different" then you need to wake up. You're contributing to the problem. Only when EVERYONE, persecutor and persecutee alike stop seeing race, creed, religion, or whatever as a dividing line, rather than just seeing another person, will discrimination end.
Frankly, sir you're logic is flawed. You say people say things like "you wouldn't understand x because your black" but the whole point of your post seems to be "you wouldn't understand me because I'm black (or because I'm a "significant deviation from the norm.") but you're not. Your not the only man who has overcome diversity, or married outside his race, or done any of those things in addition to being highly intellegent. What makes you different is you expect to be treated special because of this. You're not special, or unique. Your a human being, just like everyone you work with. And if they discriminate against you, it's probably because you discriminate against them.
I think I was expecting some backlash and misread your post. Sorry ;)
I worked for a small technology company before my current job. I was the only Black IT person, but that was normal. I began noticing that I was being blamed for some failures on projects that didn't even involve me. For example, the one guy (white) and I were working on some programs for a customer. So I put all the programs I had on disk. When we got to the customer site, they were asking about the other guys programs. One of the managers/owners got upset and we had words about the incident. When we got back to the office, the other guy wasn't even aware of the need to deliver his programs to the customer. At my current position the mixture is about 70/30, white/black mixture. Out of this mix 100% of the Black workers have college degrees. Only about 30% of the white workers have college degrees. All the major systems and technologies are supported by the Black workers.
So... if it is illegal, there exists no possibility of anyone doing such a thing. I didn't speed on the way into work this morning. No one robs convenience stores. No houses are ever broken into.
Yes, those people would have very solid ground to stand on in a lawsuit if they had proof of it. That's the trick... if you sue someone, you are supposed to prove your case. Without such evidence (anyone who would have said such a think would have not left a trail to follow), the case wouldn't have much of a chance of success.
"My friend's, brother's, friend, who works in the cafeteria, has a friend who has a brother working in HR and he told me that HR told him to only fire white people" doesn't hold much strength for such a case.
What he says is true. A child should never be told his/her IQ. Someone being tested by a student can definitely never be told their score due to the fact that the test could have been executed in correctly.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think part of that is backlash. "You've been discriminated against? Boo Hoo. It's not like you won't land on your feet." I'm not saying it's right; personally I think it's BS. Will it lead to a different kind of backlash? I don't know. I don't think so; racism and sexism is too deeply ingrained in us. Nowadays it's not called discrimination. It's disguised under "Preference". Slap a new word on it and you might get a few lemon faces, but who cares, really. "I prefer to hire blacks in order to maintain diversity." "We prefer to remain and exclusive club, and as a private institution...." "I prefer to not date interacially..."
Whatever. It's the same shit.
Yet, I can understand it. Just as well as I can understand the other side. I think I've shared in a prior post an experience from university regarding a young white male in class who took issue with Affirmative Action. He questioned "how much longer do we have to made exceptions for certain people?" inferring thatat the time (this was the early 90's) 30 years had been enough. I, wishing I could respond to his comment was immediately tempted to say "How about another 400 years?" To quote Beatrix Kiddo, I think that would make things just about square. Now that I'm little older, I'm not quite that... adamant. Yet there are reasons for that. Here in the US there's never been healing over discrimination, slavery, sufferage; none of that. We just lie to ourselves, don't bother to change attitudes, just, bury them a bit.
So you've got people, depending on where they sit on those particular issue, still sniping. You've got people claiming reverse racism (which is their right; one should not discriminate, period) when there still is an inherent bias in their favor. You've got minorities who do abuse the system (and who should be let go). You've got women who believe that in a white male dominated workforce, they've got to display bigger balls than the fellas around her to get respect. You've got African Americans who will testify to you that in the workplace and in schools who will tell you that they have to work TWICE as hard as the next non minority, or be percieved as lazy.
I've seen posts in this thread that have marginalized members of several races, and not enough talking about the good Equal Opportunity does. I've also not seen many posts referring to the reality that in many ways there's still an ol' boy network. It's not mentioned that women are the greatest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action, which has done a world of good.
Dr. King's dream wasn't solely a racial one; It was primarily a class one. It just so happened that his race was on the lowest level of the social ladder here in the U.S., and here was where he made his start. Among his own people. He didn't magically morph into an anti war guy in the last few years of his life; He was consistent throughout it. I've only taken off MLK day twice, and that was when I worked in government. Why? Well, I don't think that's a way of honoring the man. I think I need to work, and if necessary by example force those who work around me with those inherent prejudices to see me as a man; a capable equal and respect me as such. Until that day, AA needs to be around.
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
There is exactly one space after a dot or a comma - and none before it!
i.e.:
"right reasons , I do not" -->"right reasons, I do not"
All laws that attempt to correct moral problems (or perceived moral problems) founder horribly. The world is far too complicated to be controlled by law. It's like trying to grasp the wind, it's a hopeless task and will always fall apart once it's implemented. Unfortunately, many people believe they can fix the world's problems.
P.S. I'm smarter than you.
Prove it.
*looks around network room*
Where I work, in the department that I work in, every person is black. So....I guess the answer to your question, based on my limited experience, is no.
Now...I am the only female on the network team...but that's an entirely different can of worms.
If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
Most IT managers will tell you about "this one woman" or "a black guy I knew once" if you bring up sexism or racism in the IT department. Think about that for a minute...ONE. They have ONE example of someone who is above par in the IT field. They've learned from experience that the vast majority of qualified IT workers are white men.
Let's face it: white men still dominate the technology departments in most universities. What's more, women with IT-oriented degrees tend to get out of IT after a few years...I've seen more non-technical executive women with IT degrees than I have women in the IT field. They used IT as a path into management...it's often a shorter trip up than weaseling your way through a larger office staff.
One last thought: I think there's a culture of technology among white men that minorities and women lack. Women in general in this culture aren't as attracted to technology, and thus aren't as passionate about it. Men on the other hand have a love affair with gadgets; that translates into a greater interest and devotion to IT work. So men *tend* to be more capable IT workers.
It's much the same with minorities: there's something of a social stigma among blacks to spend a lot of time on computers, far moreso than there is among whites. This shrinks the hiring pool and triggers a bias among IT managers who have observed this part of the culture.
Of course, racial and sexual profiling are considered bad for a reason: while they may be based in fact, not hiring someone based on their sex or skin color throws out the good with the not-so-good. There are plenty of women and minorities in the field who are quite capable of performing. The problem is that IT managers don't take the time to tell the difference.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Just a quick comment to the original poster.
I get what you're saying. It's interesting reading the responses to your post, especially the ones telling you you're not as smart as you think you are.
I am a senior software engineer. I work with a lot of smart people. I'm smart myself. But a few years ago, I worked for/with a guy for a couple of years who was smart like you're describing yourself. He is the only person I've ever been around who was that smart. Several of the same qualities you possess: multilingual including Chinese, taught himself lots of things, etc.
And I never had a better thought than he did. Our discussions were like the ones you describe, only I was on the other side of the fence. I would make a suggestion, and he would explore it, explain all of the implications of it, and then explain why we should do it another way. When we disagreed on how to do something, I don't think I ever won the discussion, and it wasn't because he was bull-headed. It was because he had better ideas than me.
He was a joy to work for. I learned a tremendous amount from him.
Incidently, my dad's IQ is 156, and he's the second smartest person I know.
There's still racism in hiring practices, but these days it's in favor of non-whites.
Oh no, poor white people! Their birthright of a comfortable job is being stolen from them!
If your middle managers don't realize that a minority employee is underperforming, they wouldn't notice when a lily-white employee was underperforming either. Bad management transcends skin color.
There is no place without racism. Canada has lots.
What I said was:
Immigration problems != (are not equal to) racism. The problems you experience because you are a new immigrant will be there no matter what your race. All immigrants have problems. Blaming all those problems on racism is just stupid.
Of all the places in the world to come to, Canada is one of the best. Almost anywhere else, your problems would be worse, if they'd let you in at all.
That doesn't condone racism where it exists but you should develop some perspective. Blaming all your problems on racism isn't a winning strategy. Figure out what's actually holding you back and deal with that. Complaining that you can't get ahead because they don't like the colour of your skin won't provide you with a useful course of action.
Where I work we hire whoever can do the job. We can't afford to be picky based on race because then we wouldn't have any employees. There are professions in Canada that are begging for workers. If you become something like an electrical apprentice or a plumbing apprentice, I guarantee that you will get a job in Alberta.
I've found the biggest problem I have is being taken seriously from the start. In the end I usually get treated the same, but more often than not people act like I'm an idiot when we first meet. I didn't realise women were unable to comprehend anything remotely technical.
But, I'm reasonably articulate (I hope), and I try not to get too bitchy when this happens, so in the end I get treated the same most of the time. But, it does annoy me when my team will talk to someone new and that person will almost always just assume then men on the team know more than I do.
The economy, at least in the US, is tremendously varied from state to state. Some metro areas where large companies laid off hundreds (or thousands) of IT folks over the past few years are still difficult areas in which to find IT employment, since the local job market is still relatively saturated with experienced people seeking work. Other areas were far more fortunate and are able to provide job seekers with more legitimate opportunities or with less competition for those positions.
Anyone who says that finding a position is "no problem" is not being very realistic, though, at least in my opinion. It can still be a multi-month process even for those who have the best skillsets and abilities -- a lot depends on specific circumstances.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I.Q. tests must be summarily rejected, as their original purpose was to create a nordic super-race; it follows, all Mensa members, or for that matter people who respect I.Q. as a measure that matters to any degree of consequence, are neo-fascists that yern for a social hierarchy that gives them entitilements for said measure.
People should not be judged, either quantitatively (e.g. I.Q. tests) or qualitively (e.g. skin colour), with the ease that one may sort oranges.
By Godwin's Law: QED. \box
Your use of language, vocabulary, and compositional structure is self-evidently sharply below that level.
You are aware that IQ is indexed to age, right? A child who scores 190 at age 12 might score only 110 at age 24, as his or her peers catch up in intelligence as they mature.
As is the vocabulary and compositional quality of your other recent posts, eight of the last ten of which scored 1.
Those who live in glass houses shouldn't cast sentence fragments. I wouldn't trust Slashdot moderations as a good indicator of writing quality, anyway.
Your expository and vocabulary also jarringly conflicts with your assertion of "a nearly insatiable desire to read whatever I could get my hands on."
One doesn't have to write at a collegiate level to demonstrate intelligence. Sometimes, shorter and simpler words are better.
Let's all stop waving our intellectual dicks around and focus on the real topic of discussion: racism in hiring practices.
..it was still fresh.
I am in IT, and have noticed something that seems to happen specifically to minorities: they are always eventually perceived as not being team players or are otherwise difficult to deal with.
It is NEVER their technical expertise or breadth of knowledge that leads to their involuntary separation, or failure to be promoted or land large prestigious projects. They just seem to have, or develop over time, a bad attitude. Why? Is it perception, or is how people work with you the only intangible business is prepared to accept as truth?
Either way it has been my lot to witness this at least three times. Well meaning black men hired, working well or better than the norm. Some length of time later they all seem to go bad. Theft, insubordination, or they just peeter out and become part of the herd. Strangely, the reason that gets passed around is always an intangible like: "bad" attitude.
Or maybe I'm just full of it
Even the Sun goes down.
At my company, the hiring seems to be fine. No racism involved in who they hire AT ALL.
But after someone gets hired...
Do you know how long it takes a black IT hire to get fired after they prove that they can't cut it at their job? It takes FOREVER and 3 years of job probation/development plans.
We had a black manager (one of many) in my last department, he was awesome, my favorite manager to work for. A coworker on my level (also black) called him Uncle Tom numerous times for writing him up for job performance (he sucked balls). And then HR wouldn't fire him, told the manager's manager that we couldn't do it for fear of lawsuit. (Since I'm in good with the management I heard the whole story.)
I say the garden can't grow until you pull the weeds. And that includes any race. I think that, yes, racism is here, but it's not from the whites. It's from the political left who doesn't understand that the only way to acheive equality, is to start treating people EQUALLY instead of trying to make up for past mistakes.
It's time to stop feeling bad about our past and move on.
James Taylor
(No, I'm not related. However, I am on the no-fly list)
My current place:
9 people.
8 male
1 female
2 black
2 asian
rest white.
We are looking for a new person. Thus far all applicates are none-white.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
It happens. When doing a round of layoffs, I was once instructed (2002) by HR to select only middle-aged white males, because "they can't sue." Back in 1998, when doing a lot of hiring, I was instructed to "prefer" minorities when evaluating candidates to increase our diversity. If you think discrimination against non-minorities does not ever happen, you should get out more.
I've seen the latter situation occur as well. Like many, I believe affirmative action is largely a failure, but I believe that's the case because it is usually designed and overseen by white guys.
Almost everywhere I've worked, I've seen blatantly racist and sexist hiring practices - including my current workplace, which ironically is a civil rights-oriented non-profit law organization. Affirmative action is just telling racists to fix the problem themselves. For a variety of reasons, that's ineffective. So I find myself in the position of being told to, say, prefer a Latino job candidate because my company has a history of discrimination.
At some companies, white male candidates are turned down because they're white males. IBM had an official poplicy of "hiring with diversity in mind" which meant "don't hire many white males." College admission boards openly give points to minorities, and yes some DO still have outright quotas. If the system is against white males on one end, to accomodate the favoritism on the other end, then both ends become justified. If a white male gets picked because he's white, why is that unfair? The system is doing things against him on the other end. If they stop favoring white males then it's unfair to the white males overall. Do the math people.
Nuts - you beat me to it. IQ tests are usually normalized to a standard deviation of either 15 or 16 points, so his "190 IQ" would put him between 5.6 and 6 standard deviations above normal. A quick Google only returned z-to-P calculators that work up to z=5, and I'm too lazy to look too hard, but even z=5 would put him in the top 0.999999399 of the population - making him smarter than all but about 3600 people.
Hey, someone has to be at the top, but I doubt it's some guy on Slashdot whining about how no one respects him.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I've been in IT for about 12 years now as a systems integrator travelling throughout North America and have only met or worked with maybe 10 black colleagues in that time span. Although I have worked with probably twice that number of Indian colleagues and Asian. And even fewer women (3). Of course systems integration for industrial applications is a fairly small niche market. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's due to racism but more that I haven't seen a lot of black people pursuing IT careers in systems integration. There is, after all, quite a stigma associated with being a 'puter geek' and it seems to resound more so with white males with glasses and pocket protectors (you know who you are). But, if being a 'puter geek' means I'm getting paid then pass me that manual on Secure Wireless Deployment.
Figured as much. :)
> > As is the vocabulary and compositional quality of your other recent posts, eight of the last ten of which scored 1.
> Those who live in glass houses shouldn't cast sentence fragments. I wouldn't trust Slashdot moderations as a good indicator of writing quality, anyway.
Hey ass-hat: that's not a sentence fragment, it's a non-restrictive relative clause!
That's one question that is easy to answer. The U.S. is a bit trickier.
black people just recently got their freedom, NOT!
that's ironic coming from a country that sells itself as having "freedom loving, everyone is equal" philosophy!
maybe Colin Powel and Condi Rice should set their oppressed people free before invading other sovereign country, and proclaiming that other countries aren't as free as the good old Soviet America!
I just spent a few minutes perusing some of the replies made on this post and it I can conclude that it is evident that both managers and just regular IT folks do understand and condone the status quo as far as racism at the workplace is concern. I a black male have had to face instances well understood by wearing the color discrimination goggle.
For example since I graduated from college in 2004, I had the opportunity to interview with an array of IT managers at different companies here in the Mid-West United States. Some were phone-based and others were in-person interviews. All of my "first" in-person interviews resulted in an we apologize, found other well qualified individuals who were interested in this position note. So I never had the chance to meet the same individuals the second time round. However interstingly enough all of my "first" phone based interviews always opened the avenues for the second interview. However at the end of the day, I would get turned down for some obscure reason, one that I could not challenge like for example my immigration status (I happen not to be a black American).
That did go on for a while, which led me into developing a more disciplined approach in my interviewing process to allow me to make conclusions like I am about to tell you. I ensured that my over the phone and inperson demeanour matched and that while interviewing over the phone, I only restricted myself to the resources that I would if I was at the interview in person. I wouldn't go as far as coining this an "actual lab test" but it came close.
With that approach I confortably made this conclusion, they will dislike you the moment they see you. And I knew this would go on for a while until we taught the now "tender-generation" how to treat people who are not neccessarily physicaly similar to themselves.
All bad stories do have a bad ending, after all that, I landed a job on the first-phone, second-inperson basis with a bunch of emails in between. But the art to it all and maybe to non-minorities finding it difficult to land a dream job is to be yourself and make the interview longer (Fully elaborate your answers).
Just like my poor friend who has no respect to the art of listening developed in the medieval days, I do face opposition to my proposals. However unlike you, I listen and from that, I have gained impeccable knowledge into the art of software engineering and yes I am looking into swiching careers (and or advancing my conventional knowledge base) so that outsourcing my job would make my great grandfathers turn in their graves. (I am not a capitalist drove)
-Dickens
Well, I think that post is BS for other reasons, but it would take too long to explain. I will say however that a high IQ does not preclude anyone from being a corporate wage-slave. A friend of mine has a photographic memory, a tested IQ of 169, and currently holds a double-masters and is pursuing a Ph.D. in cryptography. This is only after about five years of one bad corporate job after another, with stints including PGP, a bankrupt CLEC, and a dot-bomb where the CEO was indicted for fraud and money laundering. Sometimes... well, Shit Happens(tm).
Personally? I grew up as trailer trash, also have a high IQ, and have constantly felt out-of-touch with the entirety of humanity throughout my life. That kind of schism makes it hard to interact with others, and it takes great effort indeed to overcome. But you know what the real problem is? I'm good at everything. How can you have passion for any single thing, excel at it and have ideas that raise you above the din, when everything seems interesting, and everything is equally simple? My friend has that going for him: he loves security and is a positive freak when it comes to crypto. Me? Fuck if I know.
Being a genius does not imply focus, or even drive. Hell, a lifetime of being essentially unable to connect with other people has rather detrimental effects and becomes more of a liability. If the guy posting the grandparent wasn't lying out his ass, I'd say his brain was more of a problem than his skin-color.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
I know exactly how this guy feels. I am also South Asian (but not Indian). My company recently started outsourcing, and lately I've been getting a wierd, almost hostile vibe from my co-workers. It's certainly not racism, but it does make me uncomfortable. I hate outsourcing just as much as anyone else. I call it paying the "brown" tax.
I've never seen a nigger or a spic doing any computer stuff. The only things I ever saw a nigger or a spic doing was cleaning the floors and toilets. The closest you'll ever see a nigger get to the server room is cleaning the windows or the doors that get us there. All spics care about is talking spanish and doing manual labor. They're really good at that. Just dont let them design anything more complex than a super taco supreme. They are not good managers. They cant make independant decisions without some intelligent insight by the white man. Dont let a spic make decisions because it will end in disaster. Let them clean the floors and bang nails into wood with a hammer, because thats what they're good at.
No doubt, there is still racism. For one, I know we are offered less than the Caucasian people for the same job. I have friends from Europe, they almost get the same salary as Americans because they are white, not only that but they have better advancement opportunities. How many non-white managers have you seen in corporate America?
In top of that, if you are working thru your Visa papers they will held you hostage with virtually no salary increase (but a big increase in job responsibilities/hours worked) until you get the papers. Obviously you have to play the game if you want to stay, but I think the play field should be a little more leveled. And just for reference I have worked for Enron, shell energy, reliant energy and others, and I have noticed the same pattern all across.
I don't normally double-post, but I just thought of something. I think the grandparent of this thread is actually posting as Dr. Quinn from Sealab 2021. High IQ? Multiple languages? Black? Now all we're missing is multiple Ph.D.s and a robot body...
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Age racism is not all that unfair, especially in IT. I do understand that you have more experience, but in IT with all those new technologies and changes you need somebody who adjusts rapidly to that. It has been shown that the brain slows with age in most people. I have also seen that most of the older people are very resistant to change, not too mention that they are slower to assimilate new technologies. I am sorry but IT is unique in this sense, and I am not saying this because I am 24 or so, I just turn 32 and I know I will have to get into management or get a business if do not want to be jobless in a few years. After all you want the best performer and age is a factor no doubt.
z=(190-100)/15
z=6.00000
\Phi(6.0) = 0.9999999939
Being a Black man who speaks perfect English....
(If fact while it is very true I've over some it and many other things I won't discuss on a public forum to get where I am today).
Black or white, you're obviously too full of yourself to see your own limitations.
WORD! Mom tells me my IQ tested quite high in the 3rd grade. I certainly dont feel connected to other people - they are more like something to help me not feel lonely. But, unlike you, I suck at many things. For the last 6 years I have been thinking a lot about motivation and lack thereof. It doesn't matter how smart you are - you are not going to learn algebra magically. You still have to have the motivation neccessary to read the book or pay attention in class or whatever. This is something I dont have. Making money and keeping myself comfortable and entertained has been quite easy for me so, what is my motivation to memorize boring facts? Video games are much easier to do. Reading http://www.edge.org/ won't make me a better person (maybe it's turned me into more of a racist!!). This train of thought is quickly meandering into la la land because my brain is too lazy to stay focused on my original point. anyway, see ya!
dumb racist without the saving grace of a sense of humour. The only way to prevent discrimination ( and I'm sure that I don't want to indiscriminately prevent discrimination) is to not do it. The discriminating faculty exists so that we can excersize it, I for one tend to discriminate against smelly bums sleeping on my doorstep, against child molesters ( am a parent) and against cruelty to animals. Those are just some of the things I discriminate against - there are others - but plainly there are positive as well as negative aspects to "discrimination". As to discriminating against non-caucasians, I fear i have very little experience since there are none in my work and precious few in my general line of work in the EU.
Your use of language, vocabulary, and compositional structure is self-evidently sharply below that level.
;-)
Well said! I wanted to say something like that, but was too overwhelmed with all the self-contradictions to even know where to begin
BTW, can you point to online info about IQ test norming? I'm particularly interested in historical data about the levels to which common instruments were normed in prior decades.
I state the issue. They then rephrase the issue, adding something not really relevant to the issue but closely related to show how smart they are.
Not to downplay the racism aspect here, which I'm 100% sure is there, but keep in mind that this is also just a common characteristic of tech people and they usually do it to whites too. For some reason IT people seem to be incredibly ego-driven, and seem to feel a desperate need to continually prove to everyone else around them how "smart" they are. Just look at slashdot, easily 50% or more of the discourse here is driven heavily by this phenomenon, and colour doesn't usually come into it on an online forum like this.
So while I'm sure that a notable percentage of what you're experiencing is due to your race, just remember that we all experience this, us whites too.
You and Eminem should hang out more often.
I would agree with you that it's not possible to simply look at someone's writing and tell whether they are brilliant or merely smart. However, the post in question had a fairly telltale combination of eye-brow raising statements (IQ of 190? Sure...) and massive inferiority complex (no one ever listens to me! They don't like me!).
Furthermore, I'm on my third language with English. I've seen the mistakes I make in English, and I've seen the mistakes other people make who don't have English as a first language. The mistakes generally revolve around grammatical constructs and idioms: the end would be undoubtedly English, but with a structure that borrows heavily from the native language, or with idioms that are understandable, but not used (mother tongue, native tongue, native language, etc). The original post has none of that. It has, however, a lot of tired cliches that are associated with IQ: "insatiable desire to read", etc.
All of this leads to me agree with the idea that the examples mentioned are not indicative of someone who has experienced racism, but of someone who has major attitude problems. I know I wouldn't want to work with him. And that's simply judging him on one post.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Your use of language, vocabulary, and compositional structure is self-evidently sharply below that level
Some of the smartest, sharpest engineers I've ever worked with had notable problems with English. One extremely intelligent and capable software developer typed English like a dyslexic. Another couldn't spell to save his life. I'm not sure what your point is.
I've seen a decent amount of mention about age discrimination, but everyone talks about it as the older folks are the ones subjected to such treatment.
I work for a government IT dept, and it seems that the younger people are less likely to recieve promotion. In a place where most of the average age of the workforce is probably somewhere in their late 40's, it's nearly impossible for someone like my wife who is 33 to be promoted to the billet she already fills - and has filled for 5 years. Her immediate supervisors have been sending up requests and glowing reviews for years... nothing.
I face the same issue, as a 27 year old programmer my next promotion will put me on the same level as the 50 somethings that are about to retire. I have grown a very good reputation and stand out among the crowd. I am qualified and have been the only programmer selected from my section and recommended for promotion by my immediate supervisors.
Still nothing.
Has anyone else had any experiences suffering from age discrimination because they are too young?
Look at my blog you stupid ass. I'm black.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I replied to my own post since my first one was getting buried.
Wow.... I never imagined that I'd get this many replies.......
I don't usually respond to heated subjects like this as I know it tends to either bring out the worst in people, or like I said they basically say, "Show me."
I never stated that I don't care about other's opinions; please show me how I implied that.
I am merely stating fact at things I have done. Whether or not you believe them doesn't really matter to me as I am still going to get up in the morning, go to work, make lots of money, pick up something nice for my wife on the way home and do the same thing tomorrow. (Except for the picking something, that could spoil her!)
My wife read this and was hurt (for about 3 shakes (props if you know what that refers to!)), but she did agree that I may have come off sounding a bit arrogant and I'm not at all (except in most any FPS, I will kill all who stand before me!).
I have an ego, like anyone, however to put it into context, I'm only considered of *average* intelligence where I work, so it's not like I pull John Nash's all day and write state tables on windows all day (I use Linux!).
It's just that I wanted to make those out there who think I am not capable of great things, simply because of my color or background, understand that I can.
I'm glad that this discussion hasn't degenerated into a flame war or worse, as it's one of the more interesting "Ask Slashdot" I've read. Not because of the content but the views expressed. I don't know about the rest of you but I've only seen a few replies with absolutes. The responses, like the topic itself, have been many interesting shades of gray.
Am I "pounding a podium", hell yes! Sometimes it's the only way to get someone's attention.
Looking at these replies, I'd say I have.
P.S. - To the Korean person who blew a gasket. What? I think you are misunderstanding me. Please elaborate on your point more. I could tell you were upset over something, and you said that Japanese don't consider other's cultures... I think. The company I work for isn't Japanese it's just that word took the Japanese out of my post. (Yes, I DO proof everything I post.) In any case I'd like to hear more of what you have to say.
"Chinese Amazons, power armor, laser swords.... things just meant to be." - Shampoo, A Very Scary Bet
My boss is an african american female. I'm arabic male, and there is also and egyptian female as our DBA. we have another african american female in a clerical position. our web master is caucasian female. the other 2 positions in our group are caucasian males. So i think we're a pretty diverse group.
Example : "Black officers can freely join the Black Police Officers Association without being called prejudiced, but White officers cannot join an organization devoted entirely to White Race without being called racist. Is it a crime to be proud of your heritage?" http://www.kkk.bz/cop_news.htm
Not that I get on this site really often, but once try listening to the X-Clan and visit kkk.bz at the same time, you'll see, you'll have the feeling of hearing a kind of echo of what you're reading.
You just got troll'd!
I completely understand your point of view and the reason of your original comment. My intention was to point at the fact that there are other variables that need to be contemplated, and I felt it would be a good addition to this conversation to see if you contemplated them or not (which you did as we just found out).
Troll/flaimbait or not, when he mentions the issues he faces when facing a problem and having to interact with other workers to fix it, most of the times I find that this sort of "they reply with stupid crap" argument is only the product of being impulsive and arrogant. We rely so much in our ability to solve problems, that we never listen to others, we take for granted we can do it without help, and sometimes that old guy that has an IQ right above room temperature sees something that nobody else saw.
I am also sick of people blaming others for their inability to lead a happy life (society, my skin color, that guy at work who is a jerk, my IQ is too high for them, etc). Success is not measured by the goals you achieve, but rather by how you deal with the obstacles you face when trying to achieve a particular goal.
To share my experience, I would chalk one up to phrasal verbs when it comes to the first indicator of poor english, or at least it is what was harder for me to learn (and what I am still learning), and mixing 'in' with 'on', etc. It also has to play a role how easy it is from going to your native language to another language. What I mean is, spanish is my first language and learning portuguese would have been much easier than learning german, for example.
Anyway, I don't really care about grammar since I find more value in communicating with someone. I rather have poor grammar skills in 10 languages than excellent grammar in 1. I am not implying you do, just sharing my experience.
So yeah, overall, thanks for your reply, and I agree with you: it's just a lot of tired cliches. It wouldn't surprise me that he actually gets 130 in an administered test and is just another case of a guy pretending to be smarter than he actually is, or who just got a big ego boost from tickle.com.
I don't see 190 listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Wh at_is_her_IQ.3F
At the age of ten, she tested at 228.
What may be causing the confusion is that child IQ is an entirely different measurement than adult IQ. Essentially what they are saying with child IQ is that at ten, she got the score of a twenty-three year old (OK, 22.8).
The poster's claim is that he had a 190 at twelve. In other words, he had the same score as vos Savant, just two years later.
I.e. they (and me, at the age of sixteen years and two months) happened to get a perfect score on this test. Arbitrarily, that assigned all three of us a "mental age" of 22.8. Divide by our actual ages at the time, multiply by a hundred, and you get a number that is well nigh meaningless.
It's also worth noting that the test has a somewhat restricted range. It's trying to measure spatial relations ability IIRC. Thus, criticisms of the original poster regarding writing are irrelevant. There were no essay questions on the test.
IQ scores are best seen as a curiousity. In general, someone with an IQ score of 130 will be considered smarter than someone with an IQ score of 100. However, when you start comparing scores of 190 to 228, you're in the realm of ridiculousness. It's basically all about who took the test at the youngest age.
I want an Adrienne Barbeau-bot! With chainsaw hands!!
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
On the news about 6 months ago I saw an American woman addressing a UN meeting in Sudan. She was trying to say the phrase "Black Africans" (as opposed to Arab Africans) without saying the politically incorrect word "Black". Her brain locked up for about 5 seconds after which she uttered the nonsense phrase "African American Africans"
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Your analysis is probably reasonable with respect to the very top levels of large organizations -- CEO, CFO, etc. However, the glass ceiling is sometimes quite a lot lower than that -- mid level management is often heavily male dominated. Nearly all of those men were promoted to that level in a company that they didn't found. Women have valid complaints when the ceiling is quite low. In some very large organizations, VP and Senior VP positions are frequently or even routinely filled by promotions. The lack of women in those positions is often defended on the basis of a lack of candidates. This of course might be due to a glass ceiling lower in the organization which prevented women from becoming qualified candidates for senior positions. It does vary from organization to organization, but the Fortune 500 on the whole remains heavily dominated by men.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I'm an IT manager, and I don't hire Romulans, Cardassians, or any other non-Federation trash.
I think that people as a whole, not just white or black; have been conditioned by the mass media on how to think.
Hrm, speaking from a white perspective, I can tell you from experience you're wrong. Growing up, I was taught everywhere I went that racism is a terrible evil. I went to middle school in Tampa, FL where the majority were blacks. Believe me, they crammed it into our brains every chance they got. I was extremely far from racist.
But people are going to have the most contact with the average persoon of any particular race; that is how these opinions are formed. Have you ever evaluated your own race on how they act towards a different race, particularly those growing up in the city? You just might be surprised where racism starts for most people.
Well guess what, I have been treated differently by people of other races because I'm white. Mind you, this is _not_ a select few. It's a vicious cycle really. All it takes is a few people acting racist towards you to change your mind for the rest of your life. And then you change someone elses mind, and so on. I live in the South now, and I had a friend who asked his grandfather why he hated black people. No, he didn't say some racist shit, all he said was: "you'll learn some day." So guess who taught him, blacks, not his own race.
When I meet a black or an Indian, OF COURSE I'm going to have bad feelings based on my past experiences. However, I know that just because you're a particular race does NOT mean you're like the rest. I give everyone an equal starting chance to prove to me that they are not like the rest. But that's just it, I don't automatically put them in a good light, they have to prove it to me. From what I have experienced with other races, I'm automatically viewed as the racist one and that I'm going to act that way towards them. Does that make any sense?
The best thing any race can do for itself from this point is to not act on the racial aggrevation they feel from these experiences. It will only snowball into more racism all around. Someone has to stop the hate first, stop thinking about differences and ATLEAST give others a chance. What race is going to come out on top if everyone keeps acting cliquey with each other? The majority. To me, you guys have something to prove and you need to do that and stop the bullshit.
I feel sorry for whatever some races ancestors had to face at the hand of racism(Note: this is different from me saying I'm sorry) But these people need to understand some things. One: Every race has experienced this, blacks just more recently. Two: Me and everyone else alive wasn't around then, don't try to punish people for some shit they didn't do, it will only increase the racial tension. Three: What everyone has in America is way better than what most have Africa, there's your reparation.
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
He said he was black, not mexican.
sorry, couldn't resist.
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
There are other types of discrimination. A former employer claimed their unofficial policy had been, until the year before I started, to hire people who had siblings only. Those who did not have a brother or sister were considered to have fewer social skills.
Not only that, bit there have been at least 8 vunerability warnings for OpenSSL 0.9.6b to the current known stable version. How ironic that the web admin at Mensa doesn't know how to update his redhat box. Also, and I just checked - you can SSH straight into the box as there isnt any firewall or port restrictions on their crappy Redhat server. idiots!
My survey (>1000 participants over 3 years) says about 35% of people are racial bigots or straight up racist. So it's a fair guess that there's plenty enough racism to go around in IT - even though IT employees tend to be younger and smarter than average. There will continue to be until there's a political showdown. But that's a showdown nobody really wants to happen, which illustrates the greatness of MLK. He wasn't afraid of a showdown, no matter what the cost. Most people would just rather avoid conflict. http://selectsmart.com/FREE/select.php?client=race man
I would also like to add that if IT people weren't mushroomed, there would be a lot fewer Indians, Chinese and Russians working. If you look at the *real* software industry where salesmen from Oracle, SAP, Peoplesoft and Siebel are making million dollar deals you'll find almost zero Asians. Blacks do better in sales than folks with accents and hard-to-pronounce names in English. Indians who succeed in front office and f2f IT and software businesses change or shorten their last names.
fault-tolerant
Wait a minute - that is an oxymoron! Your argument to have the parent poster seek out such a thing is moot.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
As a white person who tries to do the right thing, that makes me sad. Sad for the poster, who has to live with seeing this every day. Sad for our society, that we hurt ourselves with this kind of stuff. Sad that our efforts to reduce racism aren't working. And probably sad to realize that racism still exists more than I like to admit, and more than I see.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I want to chime in here and say that I find persecution of people offensive, and when it's motivated on the basis of ancestry or melanin, it's ignorant.
I point out my religious views to show that I'm not identifying with or defending this idea because I have the same lineage as the parent (I don't.)
I work with Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Mormons, Jews, agnostics, and probably more of which I am unaware. There's lots of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity in my work. Your religious views are irrelevant to your IT work, unless your religion requires that you physicaly attack your coworkers. I've never had that problem, except with a lunatic at a previous job, but that was a psychological issue rather than a religious one.
I work for a company that is recognized for lots of opportunities for women, and in fact there is a high percentage of women here, I see many many more men in IT than women. Is this because of sexism? I tend to think not, but it's not politically correct to suggest that.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
touche'
and spaces before them still ,makes my eyes bleed.
"best person for the job" is a tough nut to crack. I'll give an example that is not uncommon in the US.
The job might require the person to speak on the phone a lot and therefore have a native command of the language. There goes all the recently imported talent. Another requirement might be that they live within a certain distance of the office for emergency on-call situations. If the demographics of the technically qualified local talent pool are 90% white, then what? Would the person then be racist for not hiring someone that was of hispanic descent and spoke English with a Spanish accent?
I think racism exists in the tech market as much as anywhere else. I have worked in so many diverse environments because my area of the US (NY/NJ) is so diverse. I have even had conversations with US-born Indian workers where they complain about all the off shore outsourcing to India. Their parents came to the US for a reason and they don't want all the jobs to go back to India. I've had a co-worker of hispanic descent bitch about the "damn Mexican cleaning crew stealing laptops". I've worked with black people from the Caribean and Africa that distance themselves from US born black people because they consider them to be lazy.
The lesson is, stupidity knows no boundaries.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
You rock...
Simply because the deck is stacked against you (and it often is), that fact is not justification to give up. It simply means that you have to try harder. No, it's not fair, but in the real world, what is?
What truly disgusts me is that after all of the work done by Dr. King and his colleages, many of the current generations of black youth revel in "ghetto chic" and thuggery. Sadly what this does is to reaffirm the arguements of racists.
I grew up around many of those who knew Dr. King, walked with him, and worked with those around him. The "ghetto chic" mentality is something that greatly distresses all of the people that I know who fought so hard for an end to racial opression. I am likewise saddened by this, and even though I'm only 33 I can see the progression.
I wish you well in breaking these retarded stereotypes that many people have.
Both my parents and my grand-parents are intellegent people
and knew that education wasn't just school, but experiance.
Most of the kids I grew up with didn't have these oppertunities
Further, because of my appitite for music
but rather my eliteism and my attitude.
a black jamacian,
Sweads,
His boss is a white woamn.
Frankly, sir you're logic is flawed.
"you wouldn't understand x because your black"
Your not the only man who has overcome diversity,
Your a human being, just like everyone you work with.
My real last name sounds a lot like a common foreign name. You would not believe the kind of reactions I get when I mention my last name over the phone - but when I meet them face to face, I get an entirely different reaction.
I'll give you a little example. A few years ago, I got into an accident. My insurance company arranged my car to be towed to a garage. The owner of the garage was incredibly rude, refused to do any work on the car, and refused a replacement car (which he should provide, because of my contract with my insurance company).
Even though I settled things with my own insurance company, and got a car from them, it took them and me months to get the money due after the accident.
When I phoned the rival insurance company, they stated that "it's normal to have trouble when you've had an accident with (quote) one of those filthy foreigners (unquote)" . I told them the other party wasn't a foreigner, and that in fact, there was no foreigner involved. Then they mentioned MY name as the foreigner. The only reason I got my money sooner, was because I threathened to sue them for racism.
So if I, who have only a foreign sounding name, can notice racism from time to time in everyday life, imagine how it must be for foreigners who have to put up with this kind of abuse everyday?
I'd give anything to end racism NOW.
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
stupid people:
1. Whine about how stupid they are and how they should be smarter.
2. Learn to compensate for their stupidity.
#1 is fun, but only #2 puts food on the table.
Clear, Dark Skies
Men see other men (and women) promoted ahead of them, too. It happens all the time.
Yeah, but 99% of Fortune 500 CEOs and majority of company execs are male. If there's a pool of male candidates for promotion and a pool of female candidates, and people picked for promotion come mostly from the male pool, well, that kind of looks like sexism to me.
How exactly is ~10% of the population supposed to take jobs away from the other 80%?
Food for thought.
Another perfect example of less intelligence. Happens everyday. I, or any average white male, carries your ass everyday at the job. You are lazy. It is part of W. African culture. 200 hundred years does not change anything. You will need at least 2000 years before you can overcome the development of your forefathers. Look at Liberia today - not a place to find average intelligence. It is ruled by former American repatriated african americans.
Is it not the same as Most inner city african americans are less intelligent than "white trailer trash" because exam scores in mathematics proves it so. Keep spouting. The truth is painful as it should be.
"E.g. in India or China, who you know, and to whom you are related, is critical. It is hard to get ahead without being in the right group. That's especially true in India."
;-)"
:-)
"that's not racism. Its called networking. And it IS critical....Anywhere
Anywhere but America.
If you are promoted because you network with other white males then every woman's group and every ethenic group comes out of the wood work to cry foul. Yet if they network it is called fair and balanced.
"Having said that, I'll agree with you that USA is RELATIVELY more Meritocratic that anyother nation."
Relativly? You amuse me. If opprotunity were not here in America, for all people in America, then why does everyone want to come to America? The problem is too many people want laws to make up for lack of abilities.
This has been another valuable and informative opinion from:
Catahoula!
Yeah, but 99% of Fortune 500 CEOs and majority of company execs are male
So what? If you want to run a company, start one.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Looks to me like they are doing some "affirmative action", you know, "anti-racism".
You: And here you say that this company is racist for purposely trying to add mix to it's homogenious workforce, and that the "diverse" "multicultural" companies are destined to outperform them for their racism?! "Multicultural" means affirmative action in common usage, so you call them racists for trying to become what you consider non-racist?! My head just exploded!
Seriously, you're only calling them racists because they want to hire a white man (or black notice!), and to purposely not hire one of your ethnic brethren, using the zaniest doublespeak I could imagine to justify your hypocritical position.
Personally I'm against affirmative action, but I don't give it 2 opposite meanings, and I don't give "racist" 2 opposite meanings either, and I certainly don't combine some twisted change-up of the 2 meanings mid-paragraph to confuse lazy mods.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
There are some curiousities about the australian aboriginie mtDNA that makes your supposition not proven fact.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
"It seems a person's accent has a bigger impact."
This reminds me of the "Ebonics" issue several years ago. Communication is the key much of this. Spoken, as well as non-verbal.
When europeans came Ellis Island they assymilated into the American Culture,ate the food,learned the language etc,etc.
When the Irish came to America they assymilated into the American culture,ate the food,learned the language etc,etc.
When the Italians came to America they assymilated into the American culture,ate the food,learned the language etc,etc.
All of these groups were hated at one time and felt prejudice. Maybe what many percieve as racism is actually mis-communication and a difference in cultures.
This has been another valuable and informative opinion from:
Catahoula!
An IQ of 190 would statistically put you as one of the smartest people on the whole planet. And its a known fact that a majority of people with IQs in that range (and higher) have severe psychological issues. Hence, I call you "BULLSHIT".
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
maybe there are fewer latinos and blacks because if you have every looked in a CS or engineering class in any major 4-yr college, it is mostly Asians and Whites.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
So what? If you want to run a company, start one.
If you want to be President start your own country!
There are millions of female entrepreneurs. One, however, doesn't normally become the head of a F500 company by starting it.
And native Americans either assimulated or were killed.
The American ideal was to be a "melting pot". Where every person that joins the nation can contribute thier own special part to a unified super culture. Now there is a big push to make the United States more multicutural and more willing to accept people who wish to retain their own culture and isolate themselves and form a pocket community with like-cultured people.
Where I grew up, this melting pot ideal worked, because the influx of new families was pretty slow. I didn't realize that a lot of my hispanic friends were actually second generation mexicans until I was much older, infact I didn't even realize they were non-white until I was well into high school.
Where I live now, people can be third generation mexican-american and still have an accent. Because they grew up in an area of the city that is packed full of other hispanics. Speaking spanish whenever possible, eating traditional foods, etc seems to be the norm here. But in other places it would just lead to isolation.
I think a nation is strongest if all it's people can communicate and interact with one another without barriers. I am white, but I identify much better with an African-American than I do with a Chinese immigrant. For the obvious reason of that we speak the same language and have the same culture (we have thanksgiving, we've seen the same dumb TV ads when we were kids, etc). Yet the media or self-proclaimed black leaders paint a very different picture. That whites and blacks are distant and isolated from one another.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
One, however, doesn't normally become the head of a F500 company by starting it.
It's the surest way to do so. There are only 500 CEO jobs in the fourtune 500, and expecting to get promoted to one of them is just silly.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There are only 500 CEO jobs in the fourtune 500, and expecting to get promoted to one of them is just silly.
Nice strawman. No, not everyone in would should expect to become a F500 CEO, however 500 people at a time are. Given that women comprise roughly 51% of the population, and yet only hold about 2-3% of the positions in question, it should really not be that difficult to see that there is some form of glass ceiling/gender bias in place.
And it's not just ocurring at the top-level of management, it runs straight through the different levels.
poot_rootbeer writes:
He said management doesn't react, not that management doesn't notice.
The manager thinks to himself "Rick Przyanolowski isn't holding up his share of the workload, and hasn't shaped up since his last bad review, so out he goes". After all, if Rick doesn't like getting the boot, it's not like he can sue or anything...
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Given that women comprise roughly 51% of the population, and yet only hold about 2-3% of the positions in question, it should really not be that difficult to see that there is some form of glass ceiling/gender bias in place.
Talk about a straw man! This is the same statistical argument that has been tossed around ever since the left decided to re-package racial and gender dscrimination and call it "affirmative action".
It simply does not follow that because more fortune 500 CEOs are white and male, that there's something illegal or immoral about how they were chosen.
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Why is it though that I have to even indicate on a job application what my race is?? I'm white and I'm being discriminated against because it's not the Department doing the hiring but HR people who believe they have to somehow come up with a non-white person that is at least remotely qualified. Tell you what: The only question I want to answer is "Do you have what it takes to do the job (Yes/No). If yes, what makes you think so?". I don't want to answer questions like "Please indicate your ethnicity (African American/ European / ...)", "what is your DOB (or how old are you anway, pops?)". I'm pretty incensed about this because I can see it happen all around me. Oh I get work if that's what you're getting at, but after all those years of self-employed consulting it would be great to get paid on time for reasonable working hours.
Tell you what: Affirmative Action and whatever else they call this crap is pure racism. Nobody in this country should get a job just because of their race (uhoh of course I meant to say "Ethnicity") or extra jailtime because of it.
Tell you what, on my next job application I'm definitely going to say I'm jewish (I really mean it). I think I'm going to be able to live with not eating a pork sandwich at work.
It simply does not follow that because more fortune 500 CEOs are white and male, that there's something illegal or immoral about how they were chosen
It certainly implies that there's systematic problem. Somewhere. Where precisely? Is it partly because people making hiring decisions are gender biased? Yes, probably. Is it because women are bombarded with a "business for men not girls" message? Yes, probably that too.
Look, I'm not saying there should mandatory quotas or anything. But it is an issue, and it is worth investigating.
The law in South Africa prescribes "affirmative action" employment for all companies beyond a certain size. Recruiters are so tired of getting applications they can do nothing with that they advertise "Affirmative action" posts. This really means "whites need not apply". They have enough whites already, and need some blacks -- irrespective of whether they can do the job or not. A good haircut might do. Whites are also constrained in running their own businesses. "Black Economic Empowerment" (BEE) means that government work goes primarily to black owned businesses, who must apply the same discrimination when choosing their suppliers. So come all y'all darkies! Come over here to the land of unequal opportunity! Fear not the oppression of the light skinned! We have thrown off their shackles! Africa awaits you!
Maybe you're winning every argument because you're black and they don't want you to think they're racist. On top of that, if you talk white then people are not going to think you're dumb.
Logically, and argumentatively, it is wrong to always presume you are right. You're guilty of the same crime everyone is committing against you. If you are such a genius, why don't you know this?
It depends on which city you might be working in.
I currently work in the Chicago market...(my experience in this market)if you are trying to find a position in anything to do with the city, county or state, you will find that almost all...(maybe just most) employers must be minority owned & operated....so being caucasian is detrimental to your chances.......YMMV
With apologies for straying off-topic to answer...
Try http://paulcooijmans.lunarpages.com/p/essay/gold.The notorious but well-written and methodically researched 'The Bell Curve' http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684824299/002-21 85531-9075203?v=glance&n=283155 also springs to mind, if your interested in the intersection of race and racism with intelligence testing.
For a casual historical introduction Wikipedia covers the basic history and common instruments, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient , as well as the specific topic of race and intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence .
For actual tables of data from specific historical studies, refer to the copious amount of literature on the intersection of testing and education, which is arguably it's own subgenre of educational literature. You should have no difficulty finding materials."The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, preserved their neutrality." -Dante
I hear it all the time "We want someone young, energetic" - because old people are not worth the effort.
No, that's not usually it. Companies are not stupid and they know that older workers often are experienced, reliable, and skilled, and those are big plusses.
When they are looking for someone "young", there may be a number of reasons for it, like wanting someone who has time to grow into leadership roles over a couple of decades, someone where it is possible to recoup the investment in an extended training period, someone who is specifically not familiar with a field and can take a fresh approach, someone who fits socially into an already young team, or someone who a young supervisor would feel comfortable supervising.
Age discrimination in hiring is wrong--you should not reject applicants based on their age. But it's an illusion to think that factors that strongly correlate with age don't matter for hiring, and whether taking into account such factors constitutes age discrimination is something one has to look at on a case-by-case basis. In different words, yes, you can legitimately be overqualified for a job.
I doubt you'd get the same reactions if you were wearing a small Star of David pendant, which would indicate your religion just as clearly as wearing a Yarmulke.
I think what you sense is that a Yarmulke is not just an indication of your religion, it suggests (rightly or wrongly) to others that you feel strongly about religion and that you may be rather conservative. And I think that's what people are likely to react to. The reaction isn't specific to your religion--it would be the same if someone wore a ceremonial dagger, an oversized cross, or even a soccer scarf.
Ultimately, you have to decide what kind of person you want to portray through the symbols you display and the clothes you wear.
Are you actually trying to say that someone has to respect the person they marry? Thinking that getting married to someone means that you respect them is increadibly nieve at best. This gentleman very clearly defines people by the color of their skin. This is the very essence of racism. Calling me a racist because I point that out is simply 'newspeak'.
If you want to reduce racism, you have to accept that black people (as well as any other racial group) can do anything that white people can do. (and vica-versa) This includes being a racist.
"A statement isn't racist just because it mentions race. It's a complicated subject, and saying "just don't talk about it" won't solve all of our problems."
You see this guy wasn't just noting that there are people with different colored skin the same as someone might note the difference in eye color or hair color. He was defining himself and "his people" by the color of his skin. I am all for calling people out on being racest, but you have to be honest about it. White and racist are not synonymous.
Europe is currently experienceing a very real and very problematic labor shortage. As a whole, western Europe's population is aging rapidly and they are not replacing their young, the birthrate for every two Europeans is 1.6 new youths (similar to the U.S.). Without immigrant workers the vast social structures implemented in the post war years will not be sustainable. While many complain that immigration in Europe and the US is a problem, they usually don;t understand that it is a necessity if the West want to continue to live luxuriously.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
Black people can call white people crackers to their heart's content and it is accepted by society, but if a white person uses similar derogatory slang against blacks, it's wrong. Even simple things like this are glossed over and accepted in today's society, but to me seem to be signs of an ongoing reversal of bias, not an "equal rights" society. The same argument holds with "white history month", "scholarships for whites", etc, etc.
I'm no racist myself. I want a fair world. In this modern day, "affirmative action" segregates, it does not balance things. If you don't want racism, stop spotlighting race. There's no longer a need for it and it just creates tension, hard feelings, and suspicion on BOTH sides of the race line (add in sexism too, as well as any other flavor-of-the-month prejudices). Get rid of special interest everything and stop with quotas and all that other nonsense. Hire people based on their talent and worth. Accept students based on their grades.
People are people. Judge them as such.
> No matter how smart you are, or how smart you think you are,
> you are never, never so smart that you are always right and
> don't have to listen to others.
But he does listen. It's just a waste of time.
Bill Boss: "We need a solution to our supply shortage."
Joe Idiot: "I've been thinking about that, and what's really going on there is that we just don't have enough of what we need."
Well, DUH.
But the original poster is playing the wrong game. The boss doesn't want to help you find a solution. He wants you to demonstrate sufficient understanding of the problem that he can trust you to find the solution on your own. It's a contest for who best understands the problem. You need to take small steps forward until the boss is satisfied that you understand and goes away. Then you solve the problem by yourself, without bothering the boss about it.
And that's the difference between being intelligent and being smart. Smart makes you successful. Intelligent just makes you weird.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
when you go into these low end job interviews and you're the only person of a particular race there out of a dozen people, doing it professionally as you were taught, it sure looks like racism on the end of the HR person
I also wonder how you, or any one really, got around this.
Understandable enough. But not enough to just label it "racism" and troll on to the next job application. The real bugger is that it doesn't matter whether anyone agrees with you about whether it's racism or not. If this wigs you out every time, you're in trouble.
Racism, and all the other "isms," are largely about putting someone in their "proper place." In the workplace, the means are psychological. They can't string you up from a tree so they throw all this time and energy into screwing up your head so that you'll doubt your ability to get around them. Scrambling your ability to (a) earn a paycheck and/or (b) make that paycheck bigger and improve your standard of living is a *really* good way to mess with someone, both in the individual and the aggregate. If you have a spouse and/or kids, it really gets under your skin.
All "isms" are also manifestations of fear. And anyone making hiring decisions based on fear is going to pull each and every last one of their fears into the equation-- they've crossed the line already, so they dive in hard. They're scared of you because of your color. They're scared of you because you fit the profile. They're scared of you because you *don't* fit the profile. They're scared of you because you might be better than them (you're dressed professionally, they're not). They're scared of you because you highlight things that could make them look bad (you handle yourself professionally, they've been hiring folks who don't). On and on and on.
The truth is that you can't win in a head-to-head against these people. There are more of them than there are of you. You can, however, capitalize on the fact that they're going to cluster at the bottom, where their lack of skills and professionalism leave them. They and the people who prefer them over you are going to stay down there. Forget about them and focus on finding somewhere better, and somewhere else, to be.
As for how one does that... obviously I've been at this a little while and feel I've gotten past the entry-level crap successfully. And don't get me wrong, I deal with racism at the level I work at as well-- when they come up with a creative way to come after you, you get dragged back to the bottom pretty quick. I had to hire lawyers to help keep one job when a bigot with an agenda and some false accusations was given immediate credibility by HR-- becuase she was white and I was "dark." I can't say I won. Kept the job but paid a steep personal price that will take years to unravel. You never really "win" once engaged in battles about race; you just hope you come out with fewer scars than the other party.
But with that said, my first full time job was, surprise, data entry. I got it as a summer job, and since it was full-time and they had to replace me, I asked if I could stay on. Interviewed, got the yes, and off I went working full time and studying business in the evening. I got promoted within the company, mostly by luck and fate (earned it, but the opportunities were largely dumb luck), and established professional credibility.
I was not an IT major. I studied Finance. But the IT thing kept following me around.
I was in the crummy job search space for over a year before getting my degree. When I got just shy of the degree I had three choices: Go into my field of study, and take a pay cut; stay in the industry I had been working in (neither Finance nor IT), or take that IT thing that had been following me and turn it into a career. I landed an IT position through an informal contact (more dumb luck), relocated, and pulled off a $13,000 increase in pay. That was 10 years ago.
I went from that job to consulting as part of a firm that I had
The problem with your reality is that it's very one-sided, and you're only willing to admit one side and not a general trend, which leads you to bias. You keep claiming that Indians engage in nepotism, and yet because your experience is biased you seem unable to grasp that nepotism is everywhere, and not just an Indian trend. Have you ever taken a good look at nepotism that works for people like you? It's a delight to say that everything involving you is meritocratic but that's just living in a bubble. You want a counter to your Indians? Take me. When my company decided to relocate, I was given the choice to move with them, but I decided to look around at other opportunities. My dad worked at a big corporation that had openings in IT, and he set me up with an interview. Sure, I know my stuff, but the simple fact is that I was offered a position for which I was clearly unqualified, and I have no doubt that it was because my dad was the second highest on the ladder at that site. After I turned down the job offer (and talked to my dad about why) he introduced me to the guy who got the job only because I had refused. He was a much better fit, and do you want to guess what nationality he was?
You've obviously never lived in large portions of the U.S. if you think that this country is a meritocracy and ethnocentrism is dead and gone among the majority. Try being Catholic in the Midwest. Try being black in the South. Racism and its attendant problems still show up every day.
Virg
Ouch, you pointed out that I didn't bother to proof my typeing Mr. Coward. Lord knows that smart people never make grammer or spelling errors. All you have proven is that I was to lazy to proof/spell check my post. Quit being pedantic.
I may have come off sounding a bit arrogant
Sometimes the only difference between "arrogant" and "cocky" is that arrogant means you can back it up.
If you really are carrying that 190 IQ, you're not alone. 'Nuff said for this forum, best wishes.
Hi pair-a-noid, Don't mean to be an ass and cut in on this feed but I saw in a previous post you had worked on HP laserjet 4500n printers and I have one that I've done some work on. It was fine but now is printing with a ghost about every 1-1/2 - 2 inches (color or b&w). Any suggestions? Feel free to tell me how I should post if this is inappropriate. Thanks