To Solve the Diversity Drought in Software Engineering, Look to Community Colleges (vice.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Community college is not flashy and does not make promises about your future employability. You will also likely not learn current way-cool web development technologies like React and GraphQL. In terms of projects, you're more likely to build software for organizing a professor's DVD or textbook collection than you are responsive web apps. I would tell you that all of this is OK because in community college computer science classes you're learning fundamentals, broad concepts like data structures, algorithmic complexity, and object-oriented programming. You won't learn any of those things as deeply as you would in a full-on university computer science program, but you'll get pretty far. And community college is cheap, though that varies depending on where you are. Here in Portland, OR, the local community college network charges $104 per credit. Which means it's possible to get a solid few semesters of computer science coursework down for a couple of grand. Which is actually amazing. In a new piece published in the Communications of the ACM, Silicon Valley researchers Louise Ann Lyon and Jill Denner make the argument that community colleges have the potential to play a key role in increasing equity and inclusion in computer science education. If you haven't heard, software engineering has a diversity problem. Access to education is a huge contributor to that, and Denner and Lyon see community college as something of a solution in plain sight.

Comments

Diversity Drought

[Anonymous Coward]

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It's time to start fighting back against these delusional people.

Not $104 per credit. For most in Oregon, it's free

[StevenMaurer]

Here in Portland, OR, the local community college network charges $104 per credit.

Thanks entirely to the Democratic ownership of the state legislature and the governorship, Oregon promises free community college for any legal state resident starting out college from highschool (or GED), who isn't a trust fund baby, and has at least a 2.5 GPA, via the Oregon Promise Grant. You do have to file out some forms, but then you're golden.

You must meet all of the following criteria:

• Complete an Oregon Promise Grant Application by the appropriate deadline
• File a FAFSA or ORSAA application and list at least one Oregon community college
• Be a recent Oregon high school graduate or GED recipient
• Document a 2.5 cumulative high school GPA or higher; or a GED score of 145 or higher on each test
• Plan to attend at least half-time at an Oregon community college within 6 months of high school graduation or GED completion
• Be an Oregon resident for at least 12 months prior to college attendance
• Must not have more than 90 college credits completed or attempted
• Beginning with Fall 2017 applicants, students may be subject to eligibility criteria based on their Expected Family Contribution (EFC). The EFC limit for 2017-18 applicants is $18,000. New applicants who are above the EFC limit will not be eligible for an award. The EFC criteria is subject to change.

There are plenty of web development classes as well.

Re:Solutions require problems

[PCM2]

If women or Blacks or whoever feels uncomfortable, that's their problem to solve. It's not anyone's job to make someone else comfortable.

Actually it is, and there are plenty of laws about it.

Re:Does diversity results in better code?

[AlanBDee]

The best developer on my team is a girl from Vietnam. My experience has been that diversity is a good thing, but I'm not convinced that there is a "diversity problem". We're so desperate to find competent developers that we couldn't be discriminatory if we wanted to be.

Re: Solve?

[Anonymous Coward]

I highly recommend watching the movie Hidden Figures (2016) possibly it will expand your view of *your* world...

Re: Solve?

[Anonymous Coward]

It might if it were historically factually accurate, but since it's just Hollywood wish-fulfillment fiction, it will be difficult to get any information on the real world from it.

Re:alternative

[ranton]

yeah, okay but the details are completely different and they matter a ton. when a 55 year old guy who specialized in programming Z80 chips for smart bombs is laid off his skill set is useless in today's market.

No, he is "useless" in today's market for maybe a month until he has picked up some new knowledge. I have been hired twice as a senior level developer in a language or platform I have never worked in, and it generally took a few weeks to get up to speed. It took closer to six months to a year to be what I consider a true senior resource in those technologies, but I was very useful to my computer in week 2.

Re:Solve?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked in a civil service job with mostly female colleagues for 14 years and have never had any of the problems to which you allude.

Re:problem

[blindseer]

But for a software engineer, just as long as you are able to interact with the computer and have average inelegance, with appropriate training, there isn't any real reason why people of different genders or races can do the job.

I agree, there is no real reason these positions cannot be filled by people of either gender or any race. What we do see is that people of certain races and genders will, on the average, tend to score higher than average. If the seat is filled competitively then people of these races and genders will tend to fill those positions over other races and genders. Companies that wish to ignore this tendency will hire based on race and gender over their intelligence will likely be able to fill that seat, and also be at a competitive disadvantage with other companies on their final products.

I saw an interview a while back where the people were discussing South Africa and the racial tensions there. That is a nation, due to its location on a major shipping route going way back, where Europeans immigrated in much larger numbers than other African nations. Even so the indigenous Blacks still make up 80% of the population with the rest being mostly European and mixed ancestry. That nation has never seen any major engineering project until the Europeans showed up, not even so much as a two story building. This ability for the immigrants to do so much better angered the locals.

Testing for intelligence among the population shows that those of European or mixed ancestry will have 50% score above 100 IQ. Those of pure indigenous ancestry will have 20% of the population score above 100 IQ. So, sure, you can find people in South Africa of any ancestry to fill a position that requires an average intelligence and appropriate training. What you will also find is that the qualified applicants will be made up of about 4 Whites to every 1 Black.

Imagine a company that needs people with average intelligence, or above, and appropriate training to fill thousands of jobs. In fact let's ignore the training part, and assume it's only about intelligence and the training is obtained on the job. Filling that first 5 seats with a proportion matching the general population will be easy, find 4 Blacks that score above 100 on an IQ test and 1 White, then hire them all. Now iterate this. This company is pulling from a pool where 50% of Whites can pass the test but only 20% of Blacks will. With each iteration the pool of Blacks that can pass the test gets far smaller on proportion than the Whites.

Assuming the highest scoring of the applicants are selected the quality of applicants of each iteration will be lower. Also, the quality of Black applicants will fall far faster than the White applicants. What happens after years of this and many many other companies hire people based on proportion of the race of the general population rather than the proportion of the population that can pass the IQ test with a score above 100? Something has to give.

To make this work the hiring practice has to start ignoring the racial makeup of the general population, and hire more Whites. I suppose the hiring criteria can change to have this racial proportion continue, but then you have people with below average intelligence tasked with work that may be beyond their abilities. What happens then? Is the company supposed to keep these people hired even though they cannot do the work they've been hired to do? Perhaps the work can be divided up, so more complex work is given to the more capable people and the less complex work given to the less capable people. Now you have "senior" engineers and "junior" engineers to differentiate between the more capable and less capable. In the larger group of "engineer" the racial composition is 80% Black and 20% White but the senior engineers is now flipped with 80% White and 20% Black. What happens then?

I know what happens. We'll have a bunch of people complain of racial discrimination and demand that senior engineers hav