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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.
We don't want Old guys who specialized on these old time sharing mainframe systems where you had a big system, and you had charged the customer for the computing needed then provided the data remotely back to them. To be working the state of the art cloud computing platforms, where we charge the customer for the computing needed then provide the data remotely back to them.
Or these guys who specialized in Witting desktop apps for Single use PC's with under 4 gigs of RAM and screen sizes under 12" to be making mobile apps on these mobile devices with under 4 Gigs of Ram and screen sizes under 12".
A lot of the new stuff, is just a rehash of older technology, the theory behind it is the same, just some of the details have been improved.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's funny I actually never hear it in that direction. I'm always hearing about how the brown people and women are complaining about the nice things white old men built and want in on that.
If you want to be against social justice that is fine, but just don't whine about it being "unfair" when you get fired. Remember, you're against social justice, so don't complain.
"We should expect to see participation at around the same percentages as the population of the area."
This is factually and statistically false. There is no significant area of human endeavor where the percentages of the population naturally lines up neatly with the percentages of participation. If software engineering started to do so, it'd be a first.
Here's a fun random internet example:
The exact same people would have to discriminate against black kickers in the NFL as would be discriminating in favor of blacks in the rest of the NFL. That sort of proves the disparate statistics in either direction can't be the result of bias based on skin color, unless you can come up with a reason they'd be biased based on skin color only when the player's job involves kicking or not.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.