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Silicon Valley Still Wrestling With Diversity Issues
An anonymous reader writes: As major tech companies come under increased scrutiny over the diversity of their workforces, many of them are focusing solely on the "pipeline" of workers educated in a computer-related field. They're pouring resources into getting kids to code, setting up internships, and even establishing mentoring programs for underrepresented groups. But experts say they're still failing to root out their own internal biases when making hiring decisions. "That bias shows up in recruiting, with companies drawing from the same top universities, where black and Hispanic graduates are still lagging behind other groups. ... The problem is particularly acute at start-ups, where black founders are just 1 percent of venture-invested firms, according to a 2011 survey by CB Insights." The tech companies are under mounting pressure to solve this problem, and the solutions they're pursuing won't show results quickly.
A bunch of SJWs are wrestling with it. Silicon Valley is doing just fine.
How can we hire fewer white and Asian males? Any ideas?
Serious question...
Diversity is not an issue, the ONLY thing they should care is competence.
And who's the racist?
The one hiring the best candidate regardless of race/gender/whatever, or the one counting everything?
Is this the usual screaming about bias without actually measuring any?
Where are all of these women/minorities, WITH TECH DEGREES, unable to find jobs?
I had to get a tech degree before anyone would let me touch their computers, why shouldn't they?
Fridays are the traditional days for Dice SJW clickbaiting.
That bias shows up in recruiting, with companies drawing from the same top universities, where black and Hispanic graduates are still lagging behind other groups
Well, that really says everything, doesn't it?
A lot of tech companies rely on degrees, and most of them have their favorite universities where candidates generally have the skills and personalities that make an easy fit. Employing alums from the same schools has an instant effect on that "fit" part of the job -- they've all had similar experiences and can relate to each other much more readily. This is not unique to tech, but it could be exacerbated by it.
Once again, it comes back to the pipeline. If you can't get girls, Blacks, Hispanics, and whatever-ics, through the top tier education system, then maybe that's where you need to start. Not with affirmative action, however.
I will never hire someone because they are black, or are female, or whatever. That doesn't make any sense to me. I hire people that I think are capable of doing the job, because with each additional pair of hands on keyboards below me, adds to the overall expectation on me. I want people who are going to help me win, not someone who got the position because society feels sorry for them (and I don't think any genuine person wants society to feel sorry for them).
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Since when is it the problem of a company hiring top tier workers that the places producing top tier workers have different diversity numbers than the places producing the rest of the workers?
The problem starts in the homes and schools of this country. If you want more minorities and women in tech then the interest in this field has to be stimulated early in life. There must be support from the homes and schools for learning and experimenting with science and tech. By the time people have reached hiring age that battle is over. If they don't have the interest or skills then they aren't going to be a resource in the tech industry.
Come on, now:
If I were running a business, then I would also want to hire people from the top universities. They're probably better educated and prepared. If I want to hire the best people that's where I would go. I don't run the universities, and I don't decide who applies to them. How is this in any way a bias problem from the companies in SV?
These SJW articles are getting weaker and more desperate by the minute.
Love sees no species.
The problem is particularly acute at start-ups, where black founders are just 1 percent of venture-invested firms, according to a 2011 survey by CB Insights."
1. 2011. Four year old data. Really?
2. Wow! VCs aren't rushing to load a crapton of money onto failboats just because SJWs have their underpants in a knot. This is a problem how, exactly?
Nursing is 99 percent female.
It is that way because females can't doctor.
There is no comparable field for coder.
Either you are male, or you don't code.
It is as God made us.
Embrace it.
Be a nurse, or K-12 teacher, or if you are tough chick, cop, jailer, or the if you are pretty, prostitute.
They've got a serious diversity issue.
Clearly the only solution that would suit the SJWs would be if all men in IT just go and cut their wrists and hopefully bleed out. That is the only thing that will do with the SJW feminazis. They are looking for the final solution to the male question....
There's a shortage of qualified programmers, there should be a nearly 100% hiring rate for qualified programmers. How does a company hiring the white guy over the black guy when they company needs 3 more people? Both should be getting hired.
Just shut up with that bullshit allready
Even if every white straight male is gone, they will simply move on to white straight women.
I swear its getting to the point of mental illness now.
About Us:
eDiversity was founded in 2015 by Ayotunde Okonjo, a self-taught Pakistani refugee of African descent. Spending her teenage years in Ecuador facing discrimination as a lesbian of colour, Ayotunde overcame the challenges of her muscular dystrophy and moved to Silicon Valley where she met Kiri Chey, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide and Heba Mohammad, a Yemen-born teacher of the Chemehuevi Uto-Aztecan language, and together their shared interest of underground Soviet-era outsider art and Haitian folk dancing brought them together to form eDiversity.
At eDiversity, we utilize crowdsourced design and 3d printing to provide innovative solutions to underprivileged children as a solution to the global energy crisis. In addition to our LEED platinum-certified central office, we operate five international branches in Kiribati, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the South Sandwich Islands, the latter of which also qualifies as an internationally recognized penguin reserve.
We seek $5,5m in seed funding for 2.5% of the company.
"You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
Based on my calculations, this Social Justice fad ought to be over pretty soon.
It's following the same trajectory as other online fads, like Ruby on Rails and NoSQL, have followed.
Ruby on Rails first became available late 2005, but it wasn't until 2006 that it really started picking up steam. It was between 2006 and 2011 when was really hyped, and it has been totally downhill since then. As of 2015, Ruby on Rails is generally laughed at, as are the people who advocated for it. Many of them have jumped ship to other hyped projects, namely Rust. So Ruby on Rails lasted about 5 years before faltering.
NoSQL followed the exact same trajectory. Cassandra was released in 2008, and Redis and MongoDB was released in 2009, and by 2014 was widely considered a bad idea. Just like Ruby on Rails, it had a 5 year lifespan.
The online Social Justice fad is following the same trajectory as those fads did, too. It really picked up steam during mid 2009, when the whole GoGaRuCo presentation affair. It combined a Ruby conference, with a NoSQL presentation, and alleged sexism. Unlike the others, it has gone more mainstream with KONY 2012 and various other "controversies", which I think will lengthen its lifespan somewhat. But we're still nearing the end of what appears to be its 5 to 7 year lifespan.
Social Justice is now at the point where it's being used by the market departments of various web sites and organizations to garner attention (see Slashdot and Reddit as examples of this). These are usually the last people to pick up on a fad, and are among the last to benefit from it before the fad falls flat on its face.
So it looks more and more likely that this Social Justice fad will soon go the way of the Ruby on Rails and NoSQL fads. It'll become a relic of a past when sensibility was temporarily lost.
You know what subset does a pretty decent job of focusing on diversity and lower credentials to get people in? Government contracting, and it's part of the same industry as Silicon Valley. You know what is also part of the same industry as Silicon Valley and whose big firms have wretched reputations for their quality vice Silicon Valley big firms? Government contracting.
What SJWs want to believe is that every group is perfectly equal or close to it, and we're just a few policies away from achieving the magic of diversity. That's bullshit and ignores the lived experience of every family that has worked its way up from the low end of the lower class into the middle class.
If you set up a system where you can be sued for firing people if they belong to a certain group why be surprised when they are not hired in the first place? Let's say women from a particular college were likely to accuse you of rape if you broke up. How many dates would they get?
The same thing here. You need to be 100% sure you are picking the perfect protected employee because it will cost you plenty to fire them. Nobody is going to give someone a chance to prove themselves because it's too risky.
Get rid of these stupid laws and you could easily hire 100 kids out of less well known schools and keep the 5 or 10 best.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
This is just a pseudo problem, invented by SJWs
What's even funnier it's that the dolts pitching this agenda have no idea how little actual impact they're having; I founded my company with my wife listed as primary, so it's a "woman-owned business". I know not one but TWO business (one of them sizable) in which the founders were a couple of white guys and a black friend - the white guys put up the money and actually run the business, the black guy lets them use his identity as principal to make it a "minority" business.
My guess is that a significant portion of the "progress" made toward this utopian diversity goal is bullshit, and many if not most of these businesses are really funded and/or run by white men.
-Styopa
So I take it that you didn't look at the graphic? There were 7 companies listed. Out of those, only 3 had a percentage of whites greater than the amount in the pipeline. All of them were pretty close. On the other hand, all of them had more asians than would be expected by the pipeline numbers and some of them were quite skewed. Yahoo had almost double the percentage of asians you would expect.
So maybe this is, for once, a racism problem which doesn't involve white guys!
It sure seems like it's a not entirely nuanced attempt to claim that Silicon Valley is struggling to suppress its desire to be willfully racist, conspiring with venture capitalists to ensure that black entrepeneurs are deliberately kept ot of Silicon Vallley and relying on discriminatory, elite colleges to make sure their "pipelines" are kept full of priviledged white people. Really?
I also can't help but ponder the contradiction in the institutional bias narratives. On one hand, institutional bias has kept the vast majority of blacks segregated, in desperate poverty, grossly uneducated and running through a revolving door of police harassment, arrest, and prison.
Yet in spite of this narrative (which I think is probably more true than false), the black community is still creating legions of talented professionals and entrepeneurs, so many that only discrimination can account for their inability to be represented proportional to their overall population among the ranks of Silicon Valley or corporate America as a whole.
Which is it? Either the black community is so healthy and well served that it's capable of producing all these entrepeneurs, IT experts, and other sundry well-educated professionals for corporate America to discriminate against. Or, the black community is shattered and oppressed by a system that can't give them a secondary school education and wants to keep them imprisoned. It can't be both.
Simple. Just establish that you are bigoted against white and asian males, and that you won't hire any more. Lower your work standards to accommodate whichever demographics you prefer to work with, then sit back and watch your stock values plummet.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
White cis males should be the same number as trans siberian midgets in wheelchairs, and the same as wrongskin dragonkin demisexual shitlords. if its based on merit, its hate speech
I have interviewed widely in the Valley and I can tell you the main problem is segregation. People are only hiring people who look like them.
As a result, you have companies that are 90% Indian, 90% Asian, 90% Russian, 90% Canadian.
None of them are 90% white Americans any more in Silly Con Valley.
Because blacks are just as intelligent as whites - I mean, look at Africa, and everything blacks have invented.
Oh, wait...
Hiring 100 people and then firing 95 of them is hard on those fired, financially and emotionally. It gives your company a bad reputation and invites a class action lawsuit based on dealing in bad faith. Expect to pay for lost wages, moving expenses, damage to reputation.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Dat Racis!
Type 1: If you try to hire the best candidates, it means you're not maintaing your diversity/sex percentages, so you're racist/sexist.
Type 2: If you try to maintain diversity/sex percentages, it means you won't hire some people because of their race/sex, so you're racist/sexist.
Both types are stupid and racist, but at least with the first one you're hiring the best candidates!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The problem is particularly acute at start-ups, where black founders are just 1 percent of venture-invested firms, according to a 2011 survey by CB Insights.
This isn't a hiring issue. You don't hire a founder. Founders hire everyone else.
There are three places that could create this kind of issue. One, the venture capital firms may be not funding black-founded companies. Two, blacks may not be founding companies. Three, black-founded companies may not be finding the early success needed to justify venture funding. Of these, only the first might possibly be addressable by legal action. The second goes back to the pipeline issue. The third may be a sign of societal racism but is not easily addressable by government action. And it's not addressable by legal action at all. Unless you are planning on arresting everyday citizens for not buying their quota of black goods.
Look at some billionaires and you may see the kernel of the problem. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos both made billions. Both came from rich parents who could fund them past the early difficulties. Same thing for Donald Trump and Fred Smith (FedEx).
Another issue is that we ignore all the failures. There are other rich families that spent as much money on their kids businesses but failed. Does one in ten succeed? One in a hundred? From looking at the news, we can't tell. Near 100% of all news stories are about the rare runaway successes rather than the more common failures.
So this too is a feeder issue. It's hard to have successful startups without rich parents who can get past the early travails. Note that in all four examples, the kids are much richer than the parents were. It's enough to be only moderately rich. But they do require the ability to spend hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars on projects that may never pay off.
This isn't impossible to work around. Note that many immigrant communities do much better even though they too lack the hereditary success. They do so by creating extended groups that cover multiple families. This might not cover FedEx, but it's more than enough to get most startups to the size that can reach venture funding. This doesn't lend itself well to government action though. You can't mandate people joining together into more extended clans. The most successful model is Kiva, but its loans aren't big enough to release software.
The pyramids look pretty impressive to me.
... like wanting to live around their own kind. How unnatural! How evil of them! How terrible and "hateful" of them to simply want to live around other white people! It can't be allowed! The JEW says so...
That doesn't mean that they are equally qualified. In fact, it's clear that "top schools" have been lowering their standards for African Americans and Hispanics in order to achieve nominal diversity. So, when these students graduate, they are not as good as Asian and white students.
In any case, Silicon Valley clearly doesn't have a problem with discrimination against non-white tech employees because they actually are statistically over-represented.
It isn't just a problem for black/hispanic folks. If you're white/asian, do you think you're going to get a job at a company where all of your interviewers are from India? Doesn't happen - the Indian guy gets it but nobody calls them out on being racist.
I suggest reading someone who actually knows about this stuff, Thomas Sowell, on The Disparate Impact Racket.
To explain the Silicon Valley statistics with white racism, you'd have to conclude that white hiring committees discriminate against both African Americans and other whites in favor of Asians, a ridiculous proposition.
There are very, very, few blacks or mestizos that have the requisite minimum IQ (IMHO 130) to do effective IT work. Those slight few that do are quickly glommed on to by big corporations and immediately put on fast track executive management programs where schmoozing rather than hard work is the main requirement for success.
That's what already happening. Some of the best candidates are being missed because they are not white and male. The lack of effort to find the best candidates causes this, as TFA points out. Companies simply look for people from the "best" schools, rather than actually bothering to check if better candidates from other schools exist.
The way to fix it is to raise hiring standards. Get some better HR people.
Oh, unless you were arguing based on the idea of racial intelligence, in which case I can refute that too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No SJW ever complained about a predominantly black neighborhood being "too black" or "not diverse enough". No SJW ever took issue with pro league NBA teams showing a clear bias towards hiring mostly blacks. It is only predominantly white neighborhoods that are "too white" and "needs more diversity". It is only work sectors where mostly white people work that "need more diversity".
Diversity truly just means chasing down the last white person. The SJW's will not shut up about either work sectors or neighborhoods until they are 100% diverse (and consequently, catastrophically failed, like Detroit).
One of the big problems with discrimination is that many people have an implicit (unconscious) bias but little explicit (conscious) bias. This results in everyone saying they are color-blind, but acting differently. I challenge the Slashdot readers to gauge their own implicit bias by taking the implicit bias test at http://www.lookdifferent.org/w... . I found my own results to be surprising, and I suspect that yours may be surprising as well.
But they weren't built by blacks.
Don't you have a Klan meeting to go to?
idiots that suggest there is a "diversity problem" in the first place. All this does is exclude better qualified candidates by lowering the entry standards by requiring a certain percentage of this or that group.
Here is a radical notion....if you want a job go out and fucking earn it. Go to school and get a degree so you can show potential employers that you have the skills necessary to perform the work. Get someone to proof read you resume so that it isn't full of spelling and grammatical errors. Show up at an interview dressed professionally. Ease up on the neck tattoos and body piercings. Show the interviewed that you want the job not that you are entitled to it.
Realize that in Corporate America if you want to get ahead you have to fit in. Fitting in has nothing to do with skin color or gender. It has everything to do with looking and acting like the bosses do. If that's not your thing then work for a small company. If that's not your thing either then work as a contractor or start your own business.
You're arguing that some of the best candidates can't make it into the best schools, but that they're still the best candidates anyway?
SJW : Anyone who cares to discuss social issues not affecting the majority. It use to be "PC", and "*-lovers" before that.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
is this confusing to you? are you a retard of some sort?
I'm sorry but what ethnicity lives is Egypt? Egyptian?
Based on what genetic distinction do you make the claim Egyptian isn't black?
Maybe we could convince some of the to identify as black females. Really the only problem is which box is checked on a questionnaire somewhere.
This is patently untrue. The Blacks and Hispanics combined make 3% of the tech workforce, but do make over 30% of the remainder. If it were that much of a chore to fire minorities wouldn't the issue present itself in lower paying jobs as well?
There is no evidence to support that it is hard to fire minority employees. Please do not make things up.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I don't see anyone complaining about NBA player's being 75% black. An affirmative action program should be implemented to increase the number of white, Asian, and Latin players.
(Begin the old saw about diversity improving performance or viewership since the audience will be seeing people who look like themselves.)
Word verification: reject
Mmmm - I see. And, I suppose that your IQ is well over 130?
Very very few blacks or mestizos with IQ's over 130 - you know, I might agree with you. But, what is the percentage of white people with IQ's over 130? Do you REALLY think there is a difference? Really and honestly, you think that non-white people suffer a 20 point (or more) IQ handicap?
OK - what about women then? If IQ is race dependent, then what about women? Are there a lot of white women with IQ's over 130? Or is it also sex dependent?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
... and don't you go and question their courage in transgender transracial transidentity.
That's explicitly illegal and considered a major fraud ( depending on the contract ).
A minority business by law has to be majority owned and managed by the minority group it claims be.
You, your wife and the rest of your associates can all do time for this.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don't get hired
I don't understand why so many are not willing to even consider that there is some bias against minorities in tech hiring.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Actually, it would mostly just be Asian (Indian) employees that would need to be cut. If you look at the published diversity figures that some companies have put out, many (Here are figures released by Google and Microsoft) of the biggest don't even have as many white people as you would expect if the hiring perfectly followed the country's (we'll ignore local differences for convenience) racial demographics.
However, I don't think that the people who push that point of view would agree that in order to improve diversity it's necessary to hire more white people and lay off a lot of minorities, who are from a smaller minority group than Latinos/Blacks, especially when you break apart the Asian category as Indians would be even more vastly over-represented.
Or we could just realize that would be silly and that diversity is more than just a skin color. If you want a good team, you want people with different perspectives on life, and while race and culture can play into that, they're hardly limiting factors. Someone who grew up in a remote rural setting, has a special needs child, or grew up living under a totalitarian regime can probably offer a lot more insight into how a product can be used or adapted to suit the needs of different target markets than some individual whose main difference is that of pigmentation.
Why do you assume that the only way to diversify a hiring pool is to lower standards? Hasn't it occurred to you that there are other things that can be done to change this?
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Free sex change operations?
Get some better HR people.
Good luck with that!
Do you have any proof to back that up? Citations? Recent published accounts? Or are we suppose to believe your racist banter as is.
Many of us went to top universities. Did you notice a conspiracy by professors to give minority students passing grades? Even anecdotal evidence would be something. It's like you're not evening trying.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley-diversity-tech-hiring-computer-science-graduates-african-american-hispanic/14684211/
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
It's okay, they all voted for Obama, so their consciouses are clear.
You don't need to take their word for it. It's an objective measure with well-documented statistics. The truth is the ultimate argument. Sorry for your narrative.
Blacks and hispanics make 4.5 and 6.5% of the CS graduates from TOP US universities. But they make 1 and 2% of employees. So it's really not just a supply-side issues as you mention. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley-diversity-tech-hiring-computer-science-graduates-african-american-hispanic/14684211/
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I kept getting distracted by Hayley Williams. I would miss the next couple after her every time. I think my results are best explained by my decade long crush on her.
There were all of two black students who got through electrical engineering with me. They both have jobs now. There were more during my first year and they all disappeared within the first three semesters, which is around the time the math and physics starts getting intense.
We have (had) a black engineering society that got permanently banned from our engineering building for fighting, trashing a room, and fucking during their "meetings", which consisted of playing extremely loud music for hours at night while the rest of us were trying to work in the labs. I never saw any of those guys in my classes so I guess they were some other brand of engineer (at least not software, computer, or electrical).
There are literally no black engineers in the pipeline to begin with, and those that are remove themselves through poor behavior. The two EE guys I knew were not 'stereotypically' black and talked and acted normal. No cursing, no drugs, no behavior issues, no pants around their knees. They were just normal dudes, which is why they succeeded. They were like everyone else.
We keep talking about needing to improve diversity by hiring, but there's nobody to pick from. It's not like there's hundreds of black engineers ready and looking for a job, at the job fairs I attended you'd see maybe two to four black people in there.
How can silicon valley hire more blacks if there's none to hire in the first place?
Not enough posts about SJWs. Maybe when those come along, they should be given extra mod points? Now come on, this type of story makes a lot of us here uncomfortable.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley-diversity-tech-hiring-computer-science-graduates-african-american-hispanic/14684211/
If you want measurements you don't have to go very far.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I work with every minority group you can name daily and all of them are quick to play race/gender/sexual preference cards at the drop of a hat if they see an advantage. White men can't do that.
There is a running and incorrect assumption ( bias ) in Slashdot discussions that minorities are not graduating from top US universities. This isn't true, as Blacks make up 4.5% of top university graduates, and hispanics make 6.5%. A combined 11% of CS/CE graduates from top US schools. But they end up with 3% of the jobs in many of the top firms.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
There is also age. Nobody wants to talk about age-ism at these companies.
The workforce is white, male, and _young_.
Nobody is mentioning the average age of the employees, only their race and their gender. But age discrimination is also a very real thing.
If a race is under-represented, it could also mean that there simply aren't as many candidates period of those groups. So you have two main choices. You can believe that these companies are racist or biased and lying about their demand for this type of person, or you could believe that the market has spoken and it can't find enough of these people to meet the demand that is constantly being stated by reputable employers. Take your pick, but mine is on the latter since it follows the money on more levels than the former.
By your logic, white and asian people must be committing a ton of violent felonies because they're under-represented on crime stats. Either that or many of the hispanics and blacks that get convicted really are victims of racism and bias. It couldn't possibly be that some groups commit more crimes of a certain type or some groups tend to field more qualified candidates for different lines of work. Shit, by your logic I could argue that professional sports are racist because the disproportionate share of blacks in those lines of work must be a sign of bias, despite my lying eyes telling me that the ones I'm seeing are damn good athletes who could wipe the floor with most white and asian athletes.
They want to turn Silicon Valley into another Detroit? Since when competing on merit alone is bad?
I'm white. Extremely "white and nerdy" white. I don't like people in general and am extremely introverted. I do work with a lot of minorities and my SO is bi-racial (black not being one of them). It's interesting. At first I was thinking it was some kind of bullshite "white guilt" exercise til they reversed everything at the end.
Gigantic successful companies would crash and burn if they constantly hire the under qualified, under performing, incompetent white guy over the much more skilled minority who is better at doing his job. It's the same with video game makers. If you hire whoever you want regardless of skill, you get Dai Katana. If you hire the best workers in the world regardless of color or background, you get Skyrim. The fact that these companies are successful means they aren't hiring in a racist manner. What it DOES mean is that more white males are getting into computer science so there's a higher percentage of them that are absolutely amazing at their jobs.
You know why most basketball players are black? Is it racist hiring practices? No! The best players are black and they hire the best players. The source of the issue is that it became part of black culture to aspire to be a great basketball player so there's a higher volume of black people trying to get good at it which results in a larger pool to choose from with better players at the very top end. The same goes for programming. Go to an inner city school and ask any black person if doing well in school and aspiring to get a great eduction is considered "acting white" and would be frowned upon by the person's peers. The answer is yes and, it's mostly BET's fault, and it's why Facebook isn't filled with black programmers.
NO ONE is complaining about lack of women in plumbing and brick laying and no one is complaining about lack of men in nursing, home health care, etc etc. So obviously this is a 'tug at the hearts strings' of politics...,..and for no other reason.
Well, considering that the USA is about 77% white, perhaps move the damn company over seas?
Claims of racism and sexism should not be assumed true, as they reflect conditions in the whole of society. SJWs love to harp on about the fact that about 75% of people in "positions of power" are white. I counter with the 77% white census statistic and say we should have 2% more whites, or STFU about "unequal representation". Getting out what you put in is not "bias". Affirmative Action is systemic bias.
You assume admission committees don't consider race when they make a decision to accept or reject an applicant. Weaker black candidates are accepted over stronger white, asian candidates. Silicon Valley doesn't care about race because they can't afford to.
Maybe we could convince some of the to identify as black females. Really the only problem is which box is checked on a questionnaire somewhere.
It Begins!
Diversity is not an issue, the ONLY thing they should care is competence.
Folks here seem to think competence is something that can be measured objectively. Well, I have worked in places where I have seen excellent work done by folks who have a reputation for not being very good. And I have seen convoluted difficult to read code written by someone who was considered a "genius".
And then there is this asinine fad of giving people brain teasers in interviews to see how "smart" they are. Here's a question: How many baby diapers are sold in the US each year?
Here are answers by "stupid" people:
Google it.
Derive it from the US Census data.
And let's face it, it's human nature to prefer people who are like you. I was once on a panel interviewing developers. This one guy came in - a real jock. IIRC he played baseball at an Ivy League school and that's how he paid his way. Excellent grades, too.
Nope. My fellow dorks didn't like the guy.
No worries, last I heard he was a big shot at a very large integrated services company making mid six figures and offshoring jobs and firing people like me. He'll probably be CEO someday. He's a hell of a lot smarter than we were.
Get some better HR people.
Good luck with that!
Only dysfunctional organizations allow HR people to make hiring decisions. HR's job is to do the paperwork, not decide who to hire. Hiring smart people with a track record of accomplishments is a core competency of any successful company. If you have some HR admin drone reading engineer resumes, you are going to fail.
When I hire someone, I go to HR to get the position and salary range approved. Then I write the ad, I read the resumes, I do the interviews, I make the offer, I negotiate the salary, and at the end of that process, I go to HR and tell them "I just hired this engineer, so put her info into payroll." If your company does it significantly different, you have a problem.
The reason why Silicon Valley is struggling is very clear: look at the rage in this thread. These are the same people who think diversity is bad because minorities are too stupid to be a part of technology. They're still humping the meritocracy myth.
If you are angry, it means you are smart enough to know they are right, but too worried about your identity to do anything about it. And it is easy for you to do nothing because it doesn't affect you. But, it's not about making you look bad, it's about helping other people who don't have the advantages you were born with.
Realizing you're acting in a way that makes life harder for strangers doesn't make you a bad person, it is what makes you wise.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
How can we hire fewer white and Asian males? Any ideas?
Hire them overseas, so these rules don't apply.
This diversity junk is a disease. Its a mental disorder. People must take personal responsibility if they want something and they refuse to do so they have no one to blame but themselves. To say we should punish people who did work to reward people who refuse to take initiative and make the equal effort is insane and it punishes those who honestly worked for what they have. There is nothing, nothing at all that prevents people of any race, or gender, from going into IT job fields. As long as they are citizens of the country, I am all for anyone who wants to doing this. The fact is, they should have the same access to educational opportunities as everyone else. If you give anyone preferential treatment, you are creating a system of discrimination that provides a benefit to one group and not another. In fact, that seems to be what they are doing. The Bottom line, is if this group or that group is not taking advantage of the educational opportunities that is available to everyone equally, then thats their own fault and their own problem. If we are going to give these people MORE opportunities than other groups what you are doing is creating a new form of discrimination. Basically, the rule should be everyone should have access to the same educational, prepatory, and employment opportunities, regardless of their race. If people of a certain race refuse to make use of these opportunities, thats their own problem, they have to take responsibility for themselves and their actions and no one else is to blame if they refuse to do so. If we start shovelling more money at people who through their own choice refuse to take advantage of the same opportunities available to everyone else, you are punishing everyone else who WORKED and made the effort to achieve, you are punishing people for no fault of their own, people who honestly worked to achieve what they have, not having a benefit that was not available to anyone else, essentially what we are doing is rewarding mediocrity and sloth. This diversity for the sake of diversity and punish people who actually work for their achievement to reward those who refuse to take initiative has got to stop
The commentary on topic of this nature always distill down to the same two opinions: (1) just focus on hiring the right people, (2) or this horrific injustice cannot go on and must be solved immediately. Well, there is a problem, there is misrepresentation, you should base employment decisions on hiring the best people and it's not the fault of Silicon Valley nor employers in the Tech Sector anywhere else for that matter. The solution: EDUCATION ! And yes, that's not an easy sell. So much money and energy has been thrown at this problem and this has hardly budged the needle. How do you convince an under represented minority group that a solution to move successfully into a tech career requires a lot of sacrifice, hard work, an aptitude for mathematics and a willingness to look past a history of suffering discrimination ? Everyone seem to want to use color as a measure of diversity, but in the tech sector this is no way an indicator of what would be considered a traditionally white-dominated workforce with respect to employees in engineering positions. White kids aren't exactly beating a path to the university engineering and computer science departments these days. Here's a metric. We probably have more cricket clubs than softball teams in Silicon Valley.
r/shitpost
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
Not all of us have our cat as HR and dog as VP
The larger a company grows, the more power HR has. I work for a huge corp and HR does everything regarding hiring. You just put in a request for a developer with a,b,c skills and later you get invited to 2nd interviews with HR present. (the first interview is HR only) At the end, you meet with your boss & HR to decide on the best candidate. Same goes when it comes time for merit increases, HR will put in their recommendations on who should get the most. Spoilers: it's not the one that worked the hardest or improved themselves.
Maybe it's because affirmative action devalues their degrees in the eyes of the people doing the hiring?
A better way to understand this would be to look at the demographics of a world college.
Out of 10 applicants
6 would be from Asia
1 would be from Africa
1 would be from Europe
1 would be from North America
1 would be from South America
Australia wouldn't even register on the scale.
You see so many Indians and Chinese in tech because they have universities that teach tech and their are so damn many of them by world population.
So it's better they aren't hired at all?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I work for a huge corp and HR does everything regarding hiring. You just put in a request for a developer with a,b,c skills and later you get invited to 2nd interviews with HR present. (the first interview is HR only)
Can you please post your employer's stock symbol, so I can short their stock?
Another problem is that affirmative action renders degrees even more meaningless than they already are.
You have a black graduate from a "good" school, and that's great - but how do you know they actually are good, and didn't just get a free degree because said school wanted to improve its diversity stats? You don't.
Go w/ black transgender lesbians. That way, you can satisfy as many of your AA hires w/ the fewest #bodies needed, and not have to bruise the bottom line. Give them adequate job satisfaction, so that your numbers there stay constant
You mean the demographics haven't undergone a drastic and fundamental shift since the last SV Diversity article from like a month ago?
All those kids we started teaching coding to in the last couple years haven't gone to college yet? Those colleges haven't produced a diverse enough stream of students within the last 6 months? Those students haven't all gotten the 3-5 years of experience to work at Google, Facebook, Apple, etc all within the last several weeks?
Alrighty, you priviliged micro-aggressive misogynistic cis-gendered white males. You've got 3 more weeks to fix all this, or else we'll post another article complaining that the problem still exists >:-(
A bunch of SJWs are wrestling with it. Silicon Valley is doing just fine.
When women wanted to become doctors, they fought their way into med school, fought to earn a proper education, fought for credentials, and fought for equal standing amongst male doctors. When women wanted to become lawyers, they similarly fought their way through the system. Same goes for every other job women wanted to do. Women fought their way to get the jobs they wanted. Some of those fights took decades.
In tech, jobs require less qualifications than working as a doctor or lawyer. You don't need to spend years getting a masters, PhD, or going through a post-doc program. The pay for high-end IT workers can reach the same amount as the pay for low-end doctors or lawyers. The work environment in IT is often better than what doctors or lawyers encounter. Yet, tech companies can't give away the jobs to US women.
Why? Answer that question and you get to the root of the problem.
Women like to help. They'll help people, animals, forests, the environment, etc. But in general, they're not interested in working with machines. Machines don't need help. They don't care about making the next hipster app. They could care less about the coolest new programming language. They don't give a shit about all the things that cause religious wars in the tech community.
Most women don't want tech jobs because they find the work meaningless. Having done a great deal of the work myself, I'd also throw in soul-crushing. I've spent years developing apps for companies that ultimately went bankrupt. The product of my years of work? Gone. Thrown away. Has my work actually helped anyone? Hard to say. Probably not. Definitely not directly. Not in any meaningful sense. Say, I spend 3 months improving the performance of an app. Then users login half a second shorter. Big whoop. Do users even notice? Do they care? No, probably not. Does it really improve their lives? Definitely not.
When tech companies start doing truly meaningful work, then women will beat down their doors. Until then, all this effort to attract women won't matter.
Here's the problem though:
If you raise a group of people with the expectation that they're unsuitable for a particular field of work, they will de facto be unsuitable for that type of work.
So the problem is not that people who are minorities or who are female are discriminated against in hiring considerations for those jobs: The problem is that they are, in fact, less suitable for those jobs due to their environment and due to no fault of their own.
You can't fix the problem by forcing companies to hire people who are unsuitable for the job.
You'd have to fix the problem by changing all of the systems that make those people grow up unsuitable for entry into those fields.
First you'd have to make it acceptable to open a conversation about how people are being traditionally steered away from seeking a life that would make them suitable for those jobs.
Yes they were. The Arabs arrived later.
Very very few blacks or mestizos with IQ's over 130 - you know, I might agree with you. But, what is the percentage of white people with IQ's over 130? Do you REALLY think there is a difference?
I hate to be the one to break it to you but there is a well disinfected 15 point IQ gap between whites and blacks in the US.
OK - what about women then? If IQ is race dependent, then what about women? Are there a lot of white women with IQ's over 130? Or is it also sex dependent?
Hate to tell you this as well but the IQ distribution is different at the extremes between men and women. Men are twice as likely to have an IQ over 130 than women are. Get mad if you want but them's the facts.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606001115?via%3Dihub
Absolutely stunning. Slashdot is full of white self-entitled males that consider themselves superior to others just because the color of their skin. Great assumption you guys have there.
Sick of smug self righteous commercial workers blasting the NSA and its employees. The commercial guys are overdew for some negative press.
"...particularly acute at start-ups, where black founders are just 1 percent ..."
Of course we need legislation to assure that 10% of founders are black. Yes, 50% female, and what about me- 10% left handed. Every day we see founders doing well, getting rich with their IPOs and starting spaceship companies. Perhaps the law should say that no white male with a great business idea should be allowed to go forward until a certain number of minorities have had their chance. No doubt there are many minorities waiting patiently to bring their great idea forward, but they are held back by ... by ... well unfairness of course.
Geez, just dripping with sarcasm. Now I need to understand why there is such an imbalance in basketball, pop music, healthcare and child care. It seems to me that certain ethnic/gender groups are under represented. In my accounting classes, only one percent of my mates were left handed- a sure sign of unfairness!
...omphaloskepsis often...
Look, if we're talking about H1B Indians, where does anyone get off calling this group the "most qualified"? Seriously? There is massive fraud in H1B programs. Outside of IIT, most Indian graduates are WOEFULLY unprepared for the American workplace - culturally AND in terms of essential skill base.
Try landing a tech job in Silicon Valley. 90%of the recruiters are SE Asian Indian; they hire their own; the ones I have spoken with don't even know OR understand the requirements that a candidate needs to succeed, They issue online "tests" to candidates and NEVER know who really took the test.
Also, you want diversity? How about AGE diversity. The OVERT discrimination against persons of a certain age in Silicon Valley is outrageous.
How about SERIOUSLY vetting whether companies REALLY need H1B's; getting more diversity in the recruiting area, and hiring older workers. That would be a start.
Last, the sheer poverty of quality of schooling in poor black and latino neighborhoods is pathetic. Until we find ways to create conditions conducive to better learning outcomes in those communities, corporations will continue to unbalanced re: hiring those minorities.
I implore whomever to look at the comments. The people who comment on this site have already generalized under-represented minorities and women as "unqualified" and "substandard".
That is the implicit bias right there, its easy to see. It is kind of fucked up that people view minorities and women through a lens of white male supremacy, and not truthfully for what it really is.
Its sad to see educated people, particularly computer people who know statistics, use a case of one black male to generalize an entire race of diverse people.
Shorts are short term really. Problems like this fester and take a while before they impact stock prices. Invest in their competition as a long-term investment and you may well do better. Unless, of course, you manage to get lucky and short at just the right time but that is unlikely. Investing in the competition is a much more likely to be successful strategy.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Intel does this pretty explicitly. "We have dedicated $100 million dollars to ensure that at every level our employees represent the general populace in gender and race". I work for them now, but probably not much longer.
Current Egyptology is beginning to lean towards the pyramids having been created by what we know as Nubians. If they are correct then even the pharaohs were black. One of the more important pieces of evidence is that the facial structure of hieroglyphs, statues, and even the sphinx are likely ethnically black given the implied bone structures and other facial features. Those inventions have lasted longer than pretty much any other man-made thing on the planet. Additionally, we might also consider that all humans began life in Africa and were black so every single invention was made by black people although some of them have lost their melanin or developed other regional traits.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I do not know... This nigger can spell 'less' and knows that it should not be 'less' but should be 'fewer.' So, there is that...
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Only dysfunctional organizations allow HR people to make hiring decisions.
Well then, most corporations these days are dysfunctional. At most places I've seen, HR is the one posting ads, recruiting candidates, checking qualifications, etc. They "pre-screen" candidates before passing them to the hiring manager. This of course means the hiring manager has to wade through a bunch of unqualified people because HR is incompetent at checking qualifications for technical people. But that's just how it is in most companies, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
What you say is true, regarding H1B. I've said as much myself - the whole H1B program is fraudulent. But, we aren't discussing that program here, or at best, H1B is peripheral to the discussion.
This whole discussion centers on an imagined hiring preference for white males and asian males, and the exclusion of supposedly qualified females and minority workers. Maybe I should point out that "asian males" includes Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other people of Asian descent - Indians are merely the second largest subset of Asians.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
This is awesome. Because as we all know, the secret to developing any great technology starts with an even distribution of melanin and genitalia.
Women like to help. They'll help people, animals, forests, the environment, etc. But in general, they're not interested in working with machines.
Women, it was once believed, didn't have the constitution to be doctors. Women, it was once held true, didn't possess the analytical minds required for a career in the law.
Women could do without your sexist arse telling them what they are and aren't, and what they can and can't do.
You are confusing two separate issues. The H1B visa issue needs to be dealt with separately, and actually one of the arguments for helping more female and minority candidates develop and get tech jobs is to reduce the alleged skill shortage that is driving companies to hire H1Bs.
So yeah, the people arguing for improved diversity absolutely would argue for fewer Indians, because with more skilled workers available there would be less need for H1Bs.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I can't speak so much for the Chinese, but you see so many Indians because all of them are free to copy answers at the diploma mill of their choosing and then walk out with phony masters degrees ready to be snapped up by Wipro and contracted out to the lowest bidder.
There are a lot of intelligent women they could hire, but they tend to hire men who they know, who belong to their frats or went to Stanford.
Many of my colleagues teach at Stanford.
The problem for Silicon Valley is that the world has changed, but they haven't. Kind of like the Deep South.
Just Do It. Hire women as interns at a 50 percent rate. Hire Hispanics and African Americans at least at the level they exist in the general population.
There are many highly able hires out there.
I know, I've been taking classes with them, as I go for my own PhD.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Can you please post your employer's stock symbol, so I can short their stock?
Here you go
So what. Hire the best. Nothing wrong with pouring money into scholarships to encourage career decisions, but only hire the best.
You hit the nail on the head. Yes you are doing it correctly but most companies either HR or some headhunter is doing the hiring. Hell I got turned down for a job once with over 20 years experience because I didn't have DHCP listed on my resume. My Son has been looking for a fucking job for over 6 months and he has 10 years of experience and gets turned down everyday for jobs.
Its not diversity it is the hiring process that is fucked.
Out of over a 100 interviews the job I have now is the only time the person like yourself that was actually doing the hiring called and talked to me directly and I got this job right off the bat. Why? We both knew the job I was getting hired for.
BTW the team I work with One Korean, One Hispanic, ME American Indian and our boss the poor white guy. The place before that the team I was on was 4 women and 3 men all of various colors and cultures. Seems pretty diverse to me.
If this is so white then why is it the people call about work can't speak English?
This diversity stuff is just bull shit to screw us.
I don't see nearly enough Hispanic or Indian basketball players. Or enough Asian football players. We need to focus on those groups at a young age in order to have more balance. Maybe some mentoring programs should be established in order to address this issue.
Sure can be. It can cut off a search for a better job. If the new employee relocates, it can leave said employee stuck in a place with worse prospects.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Offer OTJ training.
Really, guys coming out of the Ivy league or spent their time learning the next cool CS language are no different from a typical college grad with a solid foundation of CS--just that the young guys we see in the valley had a head start to learn the hyped stuff, at the expense of foundation and basics. Since 100% of all companies in the valley offer no training (on new stuff) and looking for that short term product launch... who do they naturally hire ... and burn out?
Bring in a gal with a BS in CS, train them in new CS trends and you'll have a star performer... easily.
Chicago has taken to promoting certain races over others in order to make their diversity numbers look "better".
"The Latino firefighters had each waived race-based promotions twice as a matter of personal pride and a surefire way to avoid serving under the stigma that they didn’t deserve the promotion on their own merit.
But when they got the third promotion offer, Cmdr. Monica Porter made it clear that if they turned it down again there wouldn’t be a next time, the firefighters, who all asked to remain anonymous, told DNAinfo.com."
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago...