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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Get some better HR people.
Good luck with that!
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
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.
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.
Have you been living under a rock? There have been SCOTUS cases about this. Yes, colleges and universities lower their standards for African Americans and have stricter requirements for Asian Americans. And the African Americans that are admitted are served poorly by this kind of affirmative action: they do worse than if they had gone to lesser institutions and (apparently) don't get hired at the same rates afterwards either.
http://priceonomics.com/post/4...
Why don't you tone down your own racist banter and get some facts?
...but make up 1% of most top SV hires.
Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don't get hired
This article is comparing graduation rates today with a labor pool hired over the last 30 years. The fair comparison would be to look at only new hires directly from universities. But the author is likely more interested in pushing an agenda than in presenting the facts.
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
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?
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.
That is a nice statistic you've got there. It would be a shame if someone were to actually think about it.
As a (partially) black man, I do not need your help. Affirmative action is telling me that I am unable to do it on my own and must get help from the white man. I do not need your help. I can succeed based on my own merits or I can fail for my lack of them. My race is not, and should not, be considered - at all. That is equality. That is what I faced when I worked and I was quite successful, thank you.
I was there during the civil rights movement. I was young but I was there and I was impacted by it. I was almost 11 when MLK was assassinated. You know what we wanted then? Equality. We did not want extra rights. We did not want affirmative action. (Those came later by people who co-opted the movement to further their agenda of reparation and shame.)
Go ahead, call me an Uncle Tom... Find any excuse to ignore your own flawed logic. By your own statistic that means a high percentage of black graduates are doing well. Culture matters and I know of only three black people whom I am close with (not employees, school-mates, etc but family and close friends) who are actually technically inclined. This does not make the rest idiots. They just are not interested in using technology as anything other than a consumer. This seems to be the case with most normal people. Maybe it is white males who are mentally ill enough to subject themselves to the rigor that is code? That does not fit your narrative so I expect it to be ignored. So, yeah, go ahead and call me an Uncle Tom, it will make you feel better and allow you to keep your biases.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The root of the problem isn't what you seem to think it is. The root of the problem is that guys like you continue to push bullshit like
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.
Gender studies promotes the idea that men and women are exactly the same except for our genitalia. This assertion or hypothesis hasn't been shown true by actual science conducted by biologists. In fact, studies by actual biologists show the opposite. The brain controls hormone levels. The amount of testosterone in the bloodstream effects whether a child is interested in traditionally male-oriented or female-oriented toys. This is has been shown true for children as young as one day old. That's before a child has any chance of getting corrupted by societal influences.
Further, studies across 53 societies show that as cultures grow more egalitarian and allow men and women to do whatever job they like, we actually see more men doing traditionally male jobs and more women doing traditionally female jobs. It's only in less equal societies where men and women face unequal choices of work where we see men and women doing largely the same kinds of work. Were the differences in preference of job only a difference in culture, then we should also see different results in different cultures. That isn't the case. When given the choice, men almost always prefer traditionally male jobs and women traditionally female jobs. That suggests a biological difference between the preferences of men and women for the kind of work they prefer to do.
Here's a good video on these facts. Although, whoever posted the video to Youtube definitely should have chosen a better title. I suggest watching the whole thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...