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Black IT Pros On (Lack Of) Racial Diversity In Tech
Nerval's Lobster writes While pundits and analysts debate about diversity in Silicon Valley, one thing is very clear: Black Americans make up a very small percentage of tech workers. At Facebook, Google, and Yahoo, that number is a bit less than 2 percent of their respective U.S. workforces; at Apple, it's closer to 7 percent. Many executives and pundits have argued that the educational pipeline remains one of the chief impediments to hiring a more diverse workforce, and that as long as universities aren't recruiting a broader mix of students for STEM degrees, the corporate landscape will suffer accordingly. But black IT entrepreneurs and professionals tell Dice that the problem goes much deeper than simply widening the pipeline; they argue that racial bias, along with lingering impressions of what a 'techie' should look like, loom much larger than any pipeline issue.
What does Neil deGrasse Tyson have to say about racial diversity in astrophysics?
That's right, nothing, so who fucking cares??
http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I use to work for a company that did phone support. We had a policy of hiring a certain percent of our work force as ethnic and time and time again I saw black people who flat out "didn't want to be like white people"... I also saw it growing up in school so it didn't surprise me to see it in the work place. These people were being given jobs with no skills and getting training and this is the mentality most black workers I've dealt with have. The racial bias isn't on the side of the fence at this point that most people like to think it is. Black's just want to complain they don't have something and then blame the color of their skin.
A week ago Slashdot had another funky racist article about a black woman calling all white people homogenous because she wanted to be around more black people at work. Again we have this black vs white mentality and it's all whitey's fault for something... Not sure what it was but something... something.... white people are homogenous.....
When I was in college (2 year community college) every quarter we had the gangsta black kids who showed up for about 2 weeks so they could collect their check for a free education. Then they would go away until next quarter. This is the reason why black people don't have high graduation numbers. Many of them are gaming the system for college and getting away with it. When I hear someone talk about this when talking about black education then we'll know someone's actually paying attention.
While some racial minorities are very under-represented in IT, it is not because it's an all-White profession.
Look around in most respectable engineering/computer science/IT-training schools and you will see many people with Indian-subcontient or Asian heritage. Not even counting current HB-1 and similar visas, you still see a significant number of people with Indian-subcontient or Asian heritage in the workforce.
Yes, people of African and Latin-American heritage are under-represented in IT. However, they are also under-represented in other professions that typically require similar educational paths. The solution is not to pretend this is an IT problem but instead to realize that this is a society-wide issue, and solve it that way.
Start in preschool and work up from there.
they argue that racial bias, along with lingering impressions of what a 'techie' should look like, loom much larger than any pipeline issue.
Having once taught one of the most difficult to understand topics in mathematics, many of my students, after getting comfortable with me, told me they didn't expect me to be their teacher when they forst saw me. On one occasion, at the beginning of school, a this particular class continued with their business instead of acknowledging my presence at the podium, till I called the class to order.
Where I now work, members of the public will gravitate toward an office assistant to help them solve a problem instead of talking to me directly. This assistant then has to advise them to talk to me if anything is to be solved. I am the chief here.
I have gotten so used to this treatment that it doesn't bother me anymore.
I had this argument before w.r.t. affirmative action. I asked if they didn't want to be judged on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, and was told - seriously - that quote is from Martin Luther King Jr., and he's "theirs," so I'm not allowed to use his quote in an argument. No,.. really.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I see plenty of racial diversity. There are folks from India, China, Korea, Japan and many of the islands in the south Pacific where I work. And if you look closely at the so-called "white" folk, many come from all across Europe and Arabia. Are they represented equally? No. If anything, "white" people are underrepresented compared to their percentage of the population. It's a mistake to talk about "racial diversity" when that's not really the problem. It just distracts us by framing it as a problem of white people discriminating against non-whites.
This reminds me of the anarchist scare in the 20s. The communist scare in the 50s. The nuclear holocaust in the 60s. Then the "Japan invasion" in the 80s. Then the death of the American manufacturing economy in the 90s (which is still the world's largest, believe it or not). Then the IT outsourcing to India in the 2000s. Etc.Etc.
The only constant in this culture is people who claim it's about to collapse.
lucm, indeed.
Because he doesn't believe there's systemic racism he's a troll? Most middle and upper middle class (read: educated) white folks really aren't racist at all. At this point, maybe blacks are still looking for excuses why they can't broadly succeed. As an employer, I try to hire the most qualified candidate whenever possible, but also the best cultural fit. Often times, black dudes are the coolest, funnest, nicest people you can hire and are far less political and catty than their white counterparts. In my experience, they don't fan flames or get in office politics or tell on people or try to strategically fuck their coworkers just to get a minor advantage. Just my opinion.
I have only a single data point so it's probably not worth anything... My only experience with a Black IT professional was a network admin for the company who took over my employer. I was the previous defacto network admin even though my job description was 'embedded firmware developer'. So this company takes us over and hires this guy as the network admin. I meet him in a conference call and his first task is to come up and migrate our servers over to their corporate platform. So I volunteer to give up my weekend to facilitate since he doesn't know our existing infrastructure... He shows up and I give him the nickle tour, show him to a meeting room where he can unpack boxes and start bolting things together. I go back to my cubicle and work on some bugs telling him "if you need anything, just come get me." ... So everything's cool. He gets things connected, and starts migrating data... Around dinner time I check in with him and suggest we go across the street for a bite and a pint while data copies across the network. We have a lovely dinner and chat about families, school, weather, previous work places, etc.. All the usual stuff when you go out for dinner with a co-worker... Then we go back to the office, stop in the machineroom and it's back to business... So that was basically the whole weekend... I made sure he had what he needed from our old servers and instead of sitting around like a lump, I try to get some work done while he configures his new servers...
Monday afternoon, I get a call from my ex-CEO who says there's been a complaint made against me and I need to fly down to meet with HR. In short, the complaint was that I treated him like a subordinate because he's black and that I should remember he doesn't work for me and that I'm not his boss. Prior to that meeting, it hadn't really registered that he was black. I mean sure, I could tell his skin color was different but so is the skin color of 75% of the people I worked with back then. None of my other co-workers were black though. They were either of asian descent, italian, or middle eastern... To me, they're just my co-workers... So I get this mark on my employee record and everything kind of blows over. My future dealings with this IT guy were subsequently 100% about work and that was that. I stayed away from him as much as possible except when unavoidable. A year later, I left the company but reports from my ex-co-workers were that this guy had complained about at least 2 other people in the company and they had eventually let this guy go... Of course you never find out why someone is let go but they hired someone to replace him in exactly the same position almost immediately so the subtext is "this guy has too much 'victim mentality'."
On LinkedIn, this guy doesn't seem to hold on to any jobs for more than 1-2 years and he never seems to 'move up'.
there's no such thing as a victimless crime.
That's true. But not the GP called it "crime", as in, they are put away for non-crimes (i.e., they were incarcerated despite the lack of an identifiable victim.
The STATE is the victim.
No. The "state" cannot be a victim, it owns a monopoly on "legal" violence, and exists only to protect the rights of its citizens. If the State can claim to be a victim and kill and incarcerate citizens because to protect itself from its people, then it has become a tyranny and should be dismantled. The state should rightly fear its people, not the other way around.
And since you seem to be implying that possession and/or distribution of some state-declared contraband (an act the state punishes blacks for very disproportionally than whites), I'll leave this quote from Lysander Spooner right here for you to ponder:
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Just a note: systemic discrimination operates independently of individual discrimination.
As an example, a business or industry that recruits heavily through word-of-mouth recommendations is likely to end up with a systematic racism problem, because even though the individuals within the system may be well meaning and totally non-racist, any existing disparity, however slight, in social or employment circles, will get cemented, or even amplified given a non-zero percentage of employees will discriminate, by such a strategy.
Given the number of documented and easy to find ways in which systematic racism and individual racism exists, it's not hard to believe someone claiming it doesn't is not being honest.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well, according to government statistics, the "Percent Black or African-American" represent about 7.1% of 2011 graduates and about 7.4% of the workforce, and both are trending upwards. Compare the roughly 7.4% of black computer programmers with 10.8% of the general population. So a smaller percent of the population get the training, but those who get the training are not discriminated against for hiring purposes. (Not talking about wages, just hiring diversity.)
From the same report with a 10-year granularity, females make up about 33.9% of the 2011 graduates and about 26.6% of the computer programming workforce. Women are also making up an increasing number of the workforce that changes based on age. The report notes "these estimates could be consistent with an age effect. That is, when women are young, they are more likely to be employed in STEM, but as they age, they move out of STEM employment." The trend lines show 35-year-old females in the group as a growing population, with the growth dropping rapidly by age groups. Compare that with the 48% females in the general national workforce. So in hiring diversity women do make up a lower number by diversity but it is largely by their own choice rather than hiring discrimination.
One of the real problems with the gender gap is that many times it is a sign of wealth or poverty -- that is, in various demographics of wealthy households and poor households women are not part of the workforce. It forms a bell-shaped curve. Poor mothers ($90K) the line starts to rapidly drop again. So splitting out the numbers, if the individuals are making $30K-$50K then often the mother is educated and also the mother works. But once the family has highly paid workers, with the husband highly paid making >$90K then the women again tend to stay home with children rapidly trending back down to about 43% working once you've crossed the roughly $150K husband's income. Since the tech field is very highly paid that puts the gender gap as a voluntary choice, not an involuntary hiring discrimination.
Based both on what I have seen and also what I have read in various reports, the problem (if there is one) is at the source end of the education pipeline. When it comes to "Black or African American" demographics the number of graduates and number of workers is at parity. When it comes to females, the numbers are that women who choose to stick with the field are readily employed and that many women leave as they age at a rate far more rapid than other fields.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
A couple of years ago, I met the guys from thedailywtf.com and as the only black guy at the table, I was asked my opinion on what should be done to get more "diversity" in technology. My answer was "Nothing. The last thing we need is to have more people getting into this field if they don't have a love of it."
There are two problems, as I see it.
First, there is the racism that exists in western society.
Second, there is the anti-intellectual facet to some parts of African American culture.
Racism is complex. It takes many forms, on one hand you have the outwardly hostile racist who just plain doesn't like people of #Race and then you have what Michael Gerson dubbed "the soft bigotry of low expectations". That is manifest where many people, who think they're progressive, automatically assume that a black person is less skilled than his white or asian counterpart. I have a very Anglicized name. It's not Demetrialis or some other ridiculous nonsense like that. When people get emails from me and speak to me on the telephone, they almost never assume that I'm black.
Occasionally, when I meet someone who has only seen my resumè or spoken to me of the phone, I can see the surprise in their face when instead of a skinny white guy, they find a 6'2" 250 pound black dude.
In September, there was a teacher strike at the local district and I addressed the school board. You wouldn't believe how many left-handed compliments I received about "how well spoken" I am.
The anti-intellectualism present in African American culture is extremely destructive. I have experienced it. In large parts of the US, any black kid who is smart, who achieves academically, who has college and career aspirations is derided as acting white. I have been accused of "thinking that[I'm} white". Fortunately, I had strong parents who gave me a much different message at home and reinforced it constantly.
I traveled in different circles, I had many groups of friends, all of them distinct. Of the core group of black guys with whom I hung out when we were growing up, two of us have never been to prison; three have and one is still there. Of the white guys who were my friends, none of them have been to prison.
We all grew up in the same area. At most, five miles separated all of the various neighborhoods. There's a reason why there's such a high rate of incarceration among the black guys. There's a reason why most of the white guys went to college. We were all middle-class. None of us had particularly wealthy parents. The white guys usually heard the message that education or training was important. It was necessary to go out there and be the best person you can be. A lot of the black guys, not all and certainly not most but a lot, were primarily concerned with getting money and bitches. Fast money and lots of bitches.
These things have consequences that last far beyond childhood.
I have a M.S. degree and I work a good job in tech. I'm the only black guy in my department. I was the only black guy in my last department and the one before that(I replaced the previous only black guy when he went back to school for his Doctorate) and the one before that and the one before that. It's not the industry's fault. It's mostly not the fault of racism. It's mostly the fault of a society, subculture and families that don't impress upon young black people, the value of education.
I love tech. I love the people. I love spending my entire day surrounded by geeks.
I find far more camaraderie in that than I do among people who share none of my interests or life experiences beyond being black.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano