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.

Comments

This Social Justice fad ought to be over soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This Social Justice fad ought to be over soon.

[alvinrod]

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.

Do you really think that all the slacktivists that participated in KONY 2012 and other campaigns, which accomplished little beyond allowing the participants to pat themselves on the back about how great and progressive they were, are comparable to individuals who devoted their lives to helping others and pushing for equality?

There are still plenty of individuals who are fighting for change, and facing far more adversity than I think most of us could handle. I can't imagine many here not being supportive of such people. But then you have the modern American Social Justice movement that is more concerned with self-promotion and using problems as a vehicle for their own ends rather than solving any problems. That's who the people here are complaining about. Letting those people attach themselves to the social justice movement and then defending them when they make an awful mess of things does not help achieve social justice.

Condemning the charlatans is not the same as condemning the entire movement or its past history.

Re:This Social Justice fad ought to be over soon.

[KGIII]

Mostly other white people in my area. Of course my area is stocked right full of illegal immigrants but they are white, and Canadian, so nobody cares. The only time we have any non-white illegal immigrants (and I am only told they are illegal, I am not so crass as to go checking IDs) is during the blueberry and apple harvests. The potato harvest is still done by white kids (and poor adults) who even get two weeks off from school to do so if they are "up in the county." There is some negative consequences.

The kids used to do the blueberry picking (called raking - it is done with a rake like a cranberry rake but finer toothed and is back-breaking labor) and would earn their back to school money with it or whatnot. Now they are not even hired or considered for it. The apple harvest was guys getting ready for winter and the money was used to supplement other income (welfare maybe?) as winter beer money. The harvesters of both are Jamaican more often than not or so I am told. I have not been nosy enough to go out and ask - it is not my concern as I have other things to be concerned about. They certainly live in conditions I would not tolerate at wages I would not accept and doing work harder than I am willing to do unless I am forced to do so or am doing so as a hobby. You could say the locals were treated better and paid better when they did the jobs though I believe wage rates have gone up in those fields but not enough to matter.

For the most part, though, the illegals in my area are working in the woods or driving pulp trucks that pick up the fruits of the labor from those who do work in the woods. They do not seem to be working at the mills (the few that are left) or construction or anything like that. Those jobs seem to be filled by legal residents from my casual inquiries and observations. They are mostly 'illegal' in the sense that they have long since overstayed their work visas. ICE does not seem inclined to do much about it and I dare say that they contribute to the economy and do not work for any less than the locals do. In the case of the fruit harvesters they come in with their own campers and have all the equipment to do the job already with them as well as the expertise in handling the fruit to minimize spoilage. Locals/owners deal with the crops the rest of the year and now do not need to maintain the equipment and seek employees as they arrive in a caravan ready to work and they usually get it done in a very speedy fashion.

I do not have an objective (or subjective, really) statement on this beyond sharing the state of affairs as they seem to exist. I do not opine in either direction except to say that I think people who wish to use the services of this nation should be here legally and contribute to the nation's interests as much as they are able. I am not a part of their society and do not understand their ethics because of this which makes me a poor judge as to how we can resolve this amicably. For what it is worth, it works well enough that people are not killing each other about it in my neck of the woods and we actually have quite a few people who are here illegally for such a small state. Nobody notices and I suspect that is due to the color of their skin or the handiness of having them around for a short spell during harvest season.

Re:Weak Premise

[serviscope_minor]

These SJW articles are getting weaker and more desperate by the minute.

FromTFA:

But fresh data show that top schools are turning out black and Hispanic graduates with tech degrees at rates significantly higher than they are being hired by leading tech firms.

What's weak about that?

So many begged questions in that summary..

[argStyopa]

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.

Re: FUD

[engineerErrant]

This is patently *absolutely* true. I, my wife, and my friends have all directly observed this happening, right out in the open. It doesn't happen with all "disadvantaged" employees, but with problem employees who use their political status as a weapon and veiled lawsuit threat against HR.

To be crystal-clear, I and others close to me have explicitly heard sentences of the form "we can't fire him/her; it's not worth the lawsuit," spoken aloud, by decision-makers, clearly as a matter of policy and not as an off-hand crack, more times than can be considered a fluke.

These "poison pill" employees are a minority among minorities, but they definitely exist, and they ruin things for everyone.

Re:Huh?

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

It is an issue because race doesn't correlate with competence.

Ah, there is your error: race is, in fact, is highly correlated (both positively and negatively) in many fields. The relationship isn't genetic, it's environmental and historical, but that doesn't make it any less real.

Women don't want the work

[XopherMV]

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.

Re: Silicon Valley Isn't Wrestling with it

[Darinbob]

At lower levels there is a lot of diversity. At upper levels though it becomes very white. Not always, solidly white, but it is a distinct difference.