Slashdot Mirror
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.
Aren't you over this charade that the every white person on the planet is a racist and that everyone and society as a whole is against you? Can you stop victimizing yourselves now?
How about the fact that in urban America, there is an overwhelming mentality of selling out your black-ness if you do "smart white people" stuff... like going to college, studying, getting jobs where you wear suits, etc. Our kids are getting ostracized for not being black enough when they get good grades or have good behavior or dress well. Come on!
I applaud the young black people who make it through that and become successful professionals.
What does Neil deGrasse Tyson have to say about racial diversity in astrophysics?
That's right, nothing, so who fucking cares??
It has everything to do with brothers not getting into STEM fields. The few of us that are here get jobs pretty easily, actually. Companies want to be diverse, they just don't have the applicants for it.
Why would we need Sun to survive? Nobody uses Java applets anymore!
Oh wait. I'm a Morlock.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Are they not also a significant minority in the US? And yet somehow, they managed to vastly over-represent themselves in STEM fields. Maybe, and this may be just a wild ass guess, but maybe it's because they spent their time focusing on their homework rather than whining about diversity?
It's sad, but we're rare birds. It's not the fault of any one thing. Culturally, families DO encourage it, however, there are few mentors. I just lucked out and had a dad who was a real dad worthy of mentorship, in engineering. It's rare because of.... I'll leave it at "forces of history" (internal, and external, both).
The stereotypes can be hard to shake, though. Being taken seriously can be an obstacle. It's a different experience, I'm sure. The only way to break the cycle (IMO) is to get out there and try to teach/mentor/train (which is an entirely different can of worms.)
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
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.
Im a white guy, so take any "I know how to solve diversity problems" with a grain of salt, but one reason I'm able to be in tech is scholarships and grants.
I didn't have a lot of money growing up, and once I got to college, a state school since i couldn't afford much else, I got a free ride from grants and scholarships. Since then, I've paid years and years of taxes in payroll tax, house tax, sales tax, etc. Back then, i noticed a lot more diversity in my classes. I got my first job as a reference from a Mexican engineer who knew another Mexican engineer at the place I'd end up working. I sublet from two other Mexican engineers that went to Motorola There were a few black electrical engineers, a few female CEs, etc.
Now, it's very very expensive to go to school. If you were just on the "hey, i can barely afford to go to college" divide before, you're now on the no-I-sure-can't other side. In the US, who's more likely to be on the bad side of the can-I-afford-college question? Minorities. It's not Bull-Connor-with-a-firehose racism, but it's a filter on minorities, an extra burden on just some of us that skews numbers. And that will carry over to the next gen. Those who can't become engineers now will likely have less well paying jobs, less good school systems for their kids, and less money for kids tuition. Cycles are had to break and you really need to stop them as early as you can.
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 Graduated HS in class of 200 - 95% black, 3% white, 2% other in rural America.
How many went to college from that class? 4 total, 3 whites, 1 black (on a full ride athletic scholarship)
How many graduated? Two that I know of, I'm half. I got an Engineering Degree. The guy with the scholarship flunked out of NCAA eligibility in his 2nd year and one of the other two got an education degree. I hope more have graduated since, but I moved out of state so I don't know.
Who do they remember from my class at that school? The kid that flunked out of a full athletic scholarship.
It's not that this school was full of stupid people, it wasn't. None when to college because they didn't want too leave, or didn't want to be seen as a traitor to their race and get shunned by their friends. Many got stuck in the cycle of dependance. "I cannot wait to turn 18 so I can move out and start getting my own welfare checks!" was a commonly heard sentiment in the hallways. It still makes me sad to think many of my friends didn't even try.
This is a cultural issue not an opportunity issue. It is also a perception issue where we somehow think Outcome=Opportunity, regardless of the effort put in. This is an issue of dependance on welfare. Yet many of these people would be more than willing to look at me, a middle aged, middle class, white man as the problem. They think I am why they never succeed, but it's really because they never tried.
This is not to say racism is not a factor in some cases, I'm just saying it is not THE factor in why the statistical numbers looked skewed. We need to be totally honest with ourselves before we start suggesting solutions to this, or we will NOT fix anything, only make things worse.
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.
Now, it is also undeniably true that such talent is not present in proportional numbers amongst various minorities. That's a problem, but it's not of the tech industry's doing. There's plenty of blame to go around. Many of those minorities still suffer from inadequate education. The members of those communities must shoulder some of the burden as well - it is, all too often, still not cool to be smart in those communities. Intellectual achievement is often met with derision even within families. Girls are usually conditioned against pursuing STEM interests. Such observation is not racist, or sexist. The lack of achievement is nothing to with race or gender. It has everything to do with what the community is doing, or not doing.
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
Okay, here's the deal. I am passionate about computer science and programming. It's what I do, both for my job, and as my only hobby. I write code for open source projects, and I write code for work, and I design little one-off projects for my own entertainment.
I stayed up all night every summer growing up teaching myself how to code. When I go to the used book store, I go to the section and buy old computer science textbooks talking about esoterica (I'm the only person I know under 45 who knows any APL, for example). My bedtime reading last week was the Oberon System manual that I got off eBay for $5.00.
All this was despite the fact that I grew up in rural Texas and got my ass beaten on a daily basis for being a "geek". The fact that my family was the only non-Christian family in town meant that I couldn't go to the school administration for help; when I tried it turned into a "let's pray for you, son." And yet, I kept doing it because I was passionate about it.
And guess what? If you're that passionate about something, you'll do it regardless of what your peers think. You'll *make* it happen. We didn't have any money growing up, so I'd stay after school and work on the computers there. When we finally scraped up enough money to buy a used Commodore 64 in like 1992, I had that hooked up to an old black-and-white TV and taught myself 6502 assembly.
So yeah, I'm sick of people saying "it's someone else's fault that I can't do this." No, it's not. If you're passionate enough about it, you'll *make* it happen.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
First, we have constant articles on gender discrimination. Are we now going to get race discrimination articles? If we're all such white male racists here in Tech, why would women or black people even want to work here. These articles are getting so tiresome it almost feels like we're getting deliberately trolled.
Okay, but here's the thing. Your conclusion was that it happened because you're black. I think that's a hasty conclusion.
Not only are you black, but also you were dealing with a big, probably disorganized company. The larger the organization, the more moronic its hiring practices can be, and the more they can accidentally poop on candidates. I'm white, have a CS PhD, and have experienced similar things.
Also, even if you did actually run into racism, I suspect it's rarer than you expect. Running a software company is so difficult that one generally wants the most productive, high-quality software developers available. There's rarely enough wiggle room to accommodate personal bigotry. Most of us care a lot more about having our company succeed so we can be wealthy, than we do about skin color.
Also, you had one bad job interview experience, right out of school, and you quit the entire profession? I know that's discouraging, but seriously, you need to grow some backbone.
Here's one:
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).
Studies like that have been done repeatedly for decades. I expect that if you read the NBER study, they'd have a bibliography of older research.
Each one repeatedly demonstrates actual discrimination against blacks in hiring. I don't know how anyone could avoid that conclusion. Employers are more likely to hire a person with a white name than a person with a black name with the identical resume. It's not just socioeconomic disadvantage, inability to do the job, lack of qualifications or laziness.
I don't know if anyone has done a similar study in tech fields specifically, but it would be a good thing to do. If you're taking a black studies course, you could get a good paper out of it. Send out 100 resumes to Monster.com from Greg and 100 resumes from Jamal.
If you want to know generally why there are so few minorities in science, Science magazine has had many articles.
http://www.chicagobooth.edu/ca...
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep...
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873).
Employers' Replies to Racial Names
"Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback."
Now a "field experiment" by NBER Faculty Research Fellows Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan measures this discrimination in a novel way. In response to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston newspapers, they sent resumes with either African-American- or white-sounding names and then measured the number of callbacks each resume received for interviews. Thus, they experimentally manipulated perception of race via the name on the resume. Half of the applicants were assigned African-American names that are "remarkably common" in the black population, the other half white sounding names, such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker.
To see how the credentials of job applicants affect discrimination, the authors varied the quality of the resumes they used in response to a given ad. Higher quality applicants were given a little more labor market experience on average and fewer holes in their employment history. They were also portrayed as more likely to have an email address, to have completed some certification degree, to possess foreign language skills, or to have been awarded some honors.
In total, the authors responded to more than 1,300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical, and customer services job categories, sending out nearly 5,000 resumes. The ads covered a large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to office and sales management positions.
Here's more:
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/200...
Study: Black man and white felon – same chances for hire
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12...
In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap
"A more recent study, published this year in The Journal of Labor Economics found white, Asian and Hispanic managers tended to hire more whites and fewer blacks than black managers did."
"There is also the matter of how many jobs, especially higher-level ones, are never even posted and depend on word-of-mouth and informal networks, in many cases leaving blacks at a disadvantage. A recent study published in the academic journal Social Problems found that white males receive substantially more job leads for high-level supervisory positions than women and members of minorities."
So the fix is simple, right?
Pick the right names for your kids; problem solved.
The name one I found dubious since they chose middle-class white names and lower-class black names. It's not like they chose Billy-Ray Luellen-Mae. I suspect that a lot of "racism" in the US is actually classism where being black correlates being lower-class, and so it forms the assumption "black means lower-class unless proven otherwise". This would explain why people forget that Colin Powell was black and other successfully black men. "Black", I posit, is a hybrid race/class construct. --- Annecdote: I met a black African girl from Tanzania who **hated** African American names and African Americans and had nothing good to say about them. That was the moment that really made me realised is that it is not actually about race-itself. Personally, I notice myself much more comfortable dealing with Africans than African Americans as cab drivers, much friendlier, jovial, positive, and animated.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
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