Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
They've got a serious diversity issue.
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.
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
Are they turning them out at the same level though? Big universities discriminate like crazy, and will let weaker candidates in their pipelines in computer science if they're female or black much more easily. Some of them will do fine, but a lot will only barely squeeze through, because they were not really qualified in the first place.
Then they'll just fail all the interviews once trying to get jobs.
If leading tech firms hired at a lower rate after adjusting for universities' lower admission criteria for these people, then sure.
Google is known for having a poor hiring process, so I'll give you Google. But most tech companies lately, even the big names, don't really have the luxury of being picky when hiring. If someone is even remotely qualified, even if its a female black trans covered in tattoos going to the interview in ripped jeans and a dirty hoodie with their face covered by a hijab, they'll get hired.
That's IF they are qualified...
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.
It's not so much an ASSumption, as it is an observation. Corporations tend to hire the most qualified people. Corporations, as opposed to small businesses, simply cannot afford to show prejudice for one demographic over another. Who are corporations hiring? Let us get this straight now - they are hiring the MOST QUALIFIED PEOPLE, who also happen to mostly be WHITE AND ASIAN MALES.
By necessity, making your labor poll more inclusive means lowering standards.
BTW - it has already been pointed out that the Asian males are significantly over represented in Sillycone Valley, whereas white males are closer to "normal". That's probably a result of "No Retard Left Behind" and the Core curriculum. Our schools are being dumbed down, so fewer white males are able to excel.
"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
"Social Justice" is a leftist program of long standing that will not go away.
The wider campaign for "social justice" is not a fad and is not going away, mainly because there really is a lack of social justice in the world. But the particular fad of "gender discrimination in tech" is dying. When the issue first came up, there was intelligent debate, and reasonable people argued on both sides of the issue. No more. It has become clear that the tech companies have little control over the composition of the tech labor pool, or the tech education pipeline. Many of the SJWs' pet projects, like steering more young girls into tech, have failed. There is now a strong backlash, and articles like this one are mostly subjected to contemptuous ridicule, with only a few trolls pretending to agree with the SJWs.
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.
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
Comparing early advocates for social change and progressive policies with the current group typically associated with "Social Justice" is a bit like saying that African Americans should still be voting Republican. ...
Maybe they should be given that 50 years of lockstep voting for Democrats has gotten them nothing but being taken for granted by the Democratic Party.
And just who do you think is getting put out of work by Obama's influx of illegal immigrants?
The fact that there did used to be a lot more overt injustice is making a lot of people angry and resentful of any suggesting that there still might be a problem. This observation explains about 75% of Slashdot posts on the subject.
I don't think there's anyone who would claim that everything is perfect and I think the resentfulness is coming from having the same story pushed again and again. It would be one thing to argue that women and minorities in Silicon Valley are being paid less, but it's another to argue that not having a workforce that's exactly equal to the general population shows a lack of diversity. It would be rather silly to accuse the NFL, NBA, MLB, or NHL of struggling with diversity, and yet all of those have as much of an aberration as the tech field.
Also, you have to consider that from a man's perspective, merely being labeled a sexist at all, whether or not it is true is possibly career ending. Look at the recent shit-show controversy surrounding Tim Hunt or Matt Taylor for good examples of how out of hand it has gotten. The people who took offense and sounded their outrage are the reason there's such a backlash and why people don't even want to broach the subject. Most people aren't going to blow it up into a big deal, much like most people won't abuse you in a relationship, or most people aren't going to mug or assault you on the street, but it really only takes one to completely turn your life upside down.
When you have that kind of atmosphere, it's not conducive to debate at all. Even if you and I are both reasonable, it doesn't stop some third party from driving by and make accusations because what someone said doesn't jibe with their beliefs. There are some who would call me a racist and others who would like you as some kind of feminazi for yours just for daring to take sides.
So there is a massive push back against efforts to get diversity in tech, because if tech is doing badly then people in tech must be bad people, right? And I'm not a bad person, so the claim that there is a problem must be wrong.
I think a lot of the push back occurs because the solutions presented by the people who tend to take on these causes are unlikely to work. First they rest on the notion that a deviation from some magical number suggests that there is a problem rather than looking at whether qualified minorities are being treated worse. Here's a relevant quote from Thomas Sowell:
The idea that large statistical disparities between groups are unusual—and therefore suspicious—is commonplace, but only among those who have not bothered to study the history of racial, ethnic, and other groups in countries around the world. Among leading scholars who have in fact devoted years of research to such matters, a radically different picture emerges. Donald L. Horowitz of Duke University, at the end of a massive and masterful international study of ethnic groups—a study highly praised in scholarly journals—examined the idea of a society where groups are “proportionately represented” at different levels and in different sectors. He concluded that “few, if any, societies have ever approximated this description.”
However, the new wave of social justice sees this as a violation of a core tenet of their faith and therefore anyone who believes such a thing must be a racist. But let's assume that their belief is actually correct for the sake of argument. The article would still suck as it tends to suggest a top-down solution, in that a diversity problem in tech can be solved by simply hiring more minorities. Even if hiring standards are lowered to give preference to minorities, there simply aren't enough available candidates. Worse yet, it's likely to create even more racism/sexism/etc. as you can't expect your workforce to respect someone who was only hired to fill some kind of quota and honestly I can't say I would feel all that comfortable working