Who gets invited to the party?
medium.com
medium.com
My MS in CS in from UNC-CH.
Anybody who thinks the hackers from Duke/UNC consistently outshine the hackers from NC A&T is a damn fool.
I was regularly FLOORED by the skills and raw programming chops from peers at NC A&T. Some of the smartest young men and women in the CS field.
I worked in a small research group at NC A&T. Maybe 10 undergrads. Last time I checked, there were something like 6 MS in CS folks from that group and a couple of PhDs.
When I was an undergrad at NC A&T, we had a weekly colloquium for all CS students. We regularly had alumni from NC A&T and other HBCUs on stage who talked openly about navigating the hiring world, which companies you could expect racism in, and what the working world of programming was like for "people who look like us."
If some shitty recruiter event occurred, we all knew about it.
Want to score some of the best engineers from HBCUs? It's easy. Hire the best ones you can convince to take your mega-FAANG package from. Then send them back every freaking year with a corporate card and tell them to impress people.
I hate these "stupid recruiter" stories. Somebody should get their ass fired.
Can you give any names and/or accomplishments to support that claim?
Personally, I haven't bumped into enough NC A&T grads to form my own opinions.
I asked about noted accomplishments simply because I couldn't think of any better way (within reason) to evaluate OP's claim. I'd be happy to hear other approaches.
I would think with big tech companies would be rolling out the red carpet to CS students at HBCUs at this point.
The firm this engineer is talking about did a recruiting trip to Duke (and UNC), like every big tech firm does. An hour away from Duke is the country's largest HBCU, NC A&T, which is included on the trip, ostensibly for inclusivity's sake.
The firm serves a catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session, which is held after class hours to ensure attendance. The next day, highly-ranked prospects from Duke/UNC are invited to a private dinner at a fine dining restaurant.
That same day, the firm holds an abbreviated meeting during class hours at A&T, where they serve (wait for it) the leftovers from the catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session.
Unfortunately, anonymity can breed some distrust in the content. By calling out the company by name, it may cause others who experienced the same to speak out too.
Cisco, at least at a time did invest in A&T and NC State, far more so than UNC which it didn’t recruit from for a period.
It gets trounced by Microsoft Teams. Teams! Think about that! The latecomer to the party that's actually turned into something pretty decent.
So I find it really hard to believe that anyone working on WebEx could possibly rate Cisco as a great place to work. A great place to sit around and do sweet F.A., maybe, whilst your userbase seethes and rages, but not a great place to work.
Wouldn't it.
(Because, ummmm, I find that very believable...)
If their idea of a diversity effort is pretending to recruit black students they must be callously insensitive, and to some degree consciously racist.
It was definitely an eye-opening moment for everyone in terms of realizing which department was the CEO's favorite.
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University
I'm sure there is some positive correlation between school ranking and quality of education but it seems too weak & there are so many exceptions for this 1 data point about a candidate to be given such weight. I'd absolutely take someone who went to Colorado State University & has 3 years of relevant job experience than someone fresh out of Stanford (all other things being equal).
Also almost every time I was involved in hiring we had more competent candidates to choose from than we had jobs to fill (with exception of the highest tier jobs, like searching for a Tech Director or CTO which nobody is giving to people fresh out of school anyway) so why do you even need to butter up the Duke grads? Are recent grads with no job experience so desirable in the US?
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-looked-at-how-a-thousand-coll...
During my undergrad years, there were people who made it out without programming in any language besides Java, and barely did any tech hobbies or independent programming outside of class. There were others who were constantly learning other languages, playing with random tech, and building small opens source tools and webapps.
I've met people who went through community collect programs who didn't understand basic BigO notation or algorithm optimization (no fault to them; it's just not taught in a lot of two year courses) and I've know people with only high school degrees who've picked up advanced CS books and would learn about compile theory and different types of parsing on their own for fun.
"needs improvement, did not finish course xyz"
Nah, your instructor's/TA's time is limited. I can't schedule 6 hours with them. I can't request as much time as I want. Colleges have other prerequisites which must be filled. The American systems don't let you go to college and do nothing but computers, and you must take time away from programming courses eventually. I can't maximize the time for programming, so, I'm limited to what I can put in. And if it's a tough college, it takes real effort to pass those other courses and you likely can't just coast. It's a forcing function with guidance.
If I put in a ton of time on my own to study stuff from the internet, that's the internet returning my investment of time and focus. It's got nothing to do with the college at that point.
I'm not as sure with TA's, partly because I often skipped the TA-sessions for various reasons.
Within the software industry there should be a negative correlation between school quality and performance as an employee. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox . People who are unqualified and unfit to do good work have been removed from the pool. Anyone in the pool who is unqualified must be fit to do good work.
Also, I like your point about CSU. I do a lot of hiring in the Boston area, and we have so many "second-tier" schools who produce absolutely excellent SEs. It might be trickle-down because of MIT here. Don't get me wrong, definitely hire MIT, but we also cherry-pick from Northeastern, WPI (my favorite), etc. with equally as good results.
I graduated in the mid 90s so I really don’t have a frame of reference. But, hypothetically speaking, if I had graduated in 2012 from the same no name college but spent a lot of time “grinding leetCode” and had the technical altitude to do well in the interview would they have even given me a chance?
Heck on my very sparse LinkedIn profile, it basically showed me as an enterprise C# CRUD developer and recruiters were reaching out to me from Facebook and Google even though I wouldn’t get through the first fifteen minutes of a technical phone screen for either without at least six months to a year of prep. Recruiters throw out a wide net.
That being said, after the local market tanked post Covid, and my unknown company with less than 50 people all in did an across the board pay cut, I threw a Hail Mary and applied for a remote job as a consultant for AWS. I had the experience and I knew it was going to be a remote interview so I took a chance and got in.
But would they have recruited interns from my no name college - even if I did try to give them some type of signal like side projects and an AWS cert?
Here in Berlin it seems the market for developers is as strong as ever, regardless of Corona.
My argument is basically the low-end of the jobs that someone who went to Princeton and excelled in computer science is willing to settle for is higher than the low-end of jobs that someone who went to a lesser-name school and excelled in computer science is willing to settle for.
In theory, if the difference in quality of education is enough, then the level of education that someone who excelled in computer science at Princeton vs someone who excelled in computer science at a lesser-name college would equal out this difference in expectations, but I don't think that is the case, at least when we are talking about high-end school vs mid-range school.
Moreover, in computer science especially there is a lot of self-learning. Someone who has done consistently better than their peers probably has a good talent for self-learning, even if the average of their peers is lower.
I think you get the same discount for quality when hiring weird people or people with odd job histories.
My general idea here is that if someone is less desirable in a way which you do not care about but where other companies might care about, they are probably going to be on average of higher quality than someone more conventionally desirable asking for the same salary range. Not saying this is an iron law, but I think it is a tendency.
If only someone could create a startup to break this industrial horseshit complex...
Have you considered open-sourcing the remains of Starfighter/Stockfighter as a set of breadcrumbs for the next founders who want to?
One of those is top 5%, the other is sub-50%. It seems a stretch to say the biggest problem the NC A&T group faced was not being invited to the right parties.
SAT isn't the be-all and end all, but those difference are far too large to be brushed aside. It is not at all obvious that race is the major factor here.
There is a case here that the recruiters were being realistic; the smart black candidates would presumably be working to get into some university other than NC A&T. The CS program entrants would need to look like legitimate geniuses compared to the average to qualify for red carpet treatment.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Agricultural_an...
Sometimes this means that someone graduating from a university with a decent degree when the average intake grades were comparatively low shows they are and are capable of outperforming to a greater extent. They don't have to evidence themselves as legitimate geniuses, just that they have the capacity to develop faster.
Obviously it then comes down to bias about whether the university is just scoring people higher, but that's a whole different ballgame.
Brand name universities still get the preferential treatment though, often because they have more developed alumni links with the hiring companies.
...but by then, you'd have crushed your early career and gone off and gotten a prestigious Master's Degree, or founded your own company and sold it to one of the bigger fish, earning your way into Sr Leadership...
And I suspect its the pipeline of people who end up in HR positions that is a problem as well.
Historical discrimination has left black families much poorer than they would otherwise be. Poverty discriminates in myriad ways: lack of good role models and mentors, poor educational environments, lack of nutrition, lack of opportunities for enrichment, etc...
Discrimination is also still present and different ethnic groups are affected differently.
The negative effects of poverty and discrimination compound over time such that when you get to a tech company's hiring process, the pipeline would have shrunk massively. The students in this pipeline are competing against upper middle class kids who have been groomed their entire lives to compete in the system designed by people like them.
As to the recruiting pipeline, there is class elitism/narrow mindedness in tech companies that does narrow recruiting. Some interviewers don't countenance views or attitudes other than their own just as some recruiters favor certain universities far more than others. This seems to be changing at least at the recruiting level.
As to why some ethnicities still succeed or fail despite discrimination, that is at least partly cultural and partly selection bias and these in turn have also been affected by discrimination past and present.
Lastly, I suspect the beef some poorer whites have is that they too have been discriminated against due to poverty and they feel that another group now has a leg up on them and that discrimination against them isn't acknowledged.
I hope that we come up with a just system for everyone.
While this is true in some cases, and you do point out that "discriminiation is also still present", I can strongly recommend "Reflecting on the Color of My Skin" by Marques Brownlee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-_WXXVye3Y
Regardless of the material differences between black and white people, I think white people (including myself) tend to underestimate the effect of constantly being treated as "the first black guy who..." -- that's racism too, and while not always toxic, it holds up a lot of other discriminatory practices by being the foundation of differentiation.
See this interview https://youtu.be/3RG5pXTpLBI 18 minutes in. He was short and was failing out of spacewalk training so he figured out a way to make it work.
What do you mean by this more specifically? If you're a part of a minority with a history of oppression, which I hope we can all agree is true for black people in the US, are you saying there's zero things questionable about constantly pointing out that someone is black when they enter a "typically white" area of sports or other activity?
I have always taken for granted that the definition of "racism" is not necessarily the same as "hating someone due to their race", but more generally "defining someone primarily by their race in a situation that does not call for it and only secondly by individual attributes". Examples of where it may be "called for" is obviously up for debate, could be highly relevant in medical trials for example.
The first is the person or people who is/are potentially the first of a particular ethnic group to achieve a position. If you are that person or people, you will need courage to not let that dissuade you. I don’t see any discrimination there. If you are dissuaded because there is no one before you, then you need more determination because for most people bad things happen in life and you need to deal with it.
The second is everyone else. It would be discriminatory if others defined the first by their race in that situation. But that discrimination doesn’t necessarily happen.
Surely it is annoying and may make achievers to prove themselves over and over again, I don't think that it is big enough of an issue to dismiss programs that are designed to tackle real issues in the society. It's just that people should know where to stop and don't try to implement these in communities where less than perfect but good-enough status is achieved.
It's well known fact that kids of alumni traditionally get accepted in their fathers ivy-league alma matter, but god forbid if few minority kids get an easy way in, then you have viral videos about how it's impossible to get into SOMETHING unless you are black asian gay.
Apple makes a summer coding camp for girls, and you have men crying all over the internet that it's now impossible for men to make career tech anymore.
I mean, I myself have some macho pride(in a sence that men should have some qualities, like not crying when something is not happening the way they want and so on) and makes me cringe when I see an able bodied man crying about how a school girl got an easy way and she is not better than him but he got left out. I think Greta Thunberg struck a cord there, it was hard to watch grown up men having their egos crushed by a teenager.
If you have nothing, and if your parents have nothing, you can't risk it on a new venture.
Probably still easier to pretend that you come from nothing than being successful while actually coming from nothing.
The downside is that we lack a sense of nobless oblige. the idea that much will be demanded of those to whom much is given doesn't mesh well with our values of universal humanism - people born to privilege on this side of the pond seem to have more of a sense of guilt than duty about that fact.
That being said, poor black African Americans (and Aboriginal Australians) have horrible life outcomes, far worse than any I could expect. Second generation black immigrants from Nigeria and Ethopia have better life outcomes than the general US population so it's not just about skin colour. I feel that there is a whole host of intergenerational related issues impacting the African American community. In addition, I feel that mainstream culture is quite hostile to African American culture.
But people working on this problem already know this at a deep level. This does not take away from the importance of understanding how race fits into the systems of oppression.
i.e. I just googled it [1]. The fourth link talks about the relationship between usage of White Privilege and how it impacts peoples view of poor white people. There is so much emphasis on skin colour that the guy in the Youtube video literally won the privilege lottery at birth (compared to ~95% of other Americans) and still feels oppressed enough to make a video about it.
If his video had of been purely about solidarity for the Americans born porn and black I would have supported it since that demographic needs solidarity to help get out of the hole they were born into. Instead, he made it about himself and his rich boy problems.
This is also not new information. Again, this is the basis of intersectional analysis. Activists have been talking about this and working on this for decades, yet people use this as some sort of argument that modern analysis is broken. "White Privilege" only means "being born white is a ticket to a silver spoon" to people who haven't been involved in this discussion before.
Where I stand right now even my own race, asian females prefer to date white males over their own race. If you don't believe me watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ8LzkIfmxw. That's just one aspect of the extent of racism we suffer from. It's so bad that females of our own race are disgusted with males of the same race.
I've seen a lot of racism, I've had to battle a lot of the challenges of simply being an asian in a white dominated country, my parents had an even harder time with the language barrier when they first jumped off the boat with literally a dollar in their pocket.
Despite all of this, from my own personal experience I will say this:
The lack of diversity in tech is mostly a pipeline problem. Certain races or cultures or sexes simply don't want to go into tech or aren't willing to put in the effort. You don't even need to go to college anymore to get in, the financial barriers of entry for tech are extremely low.
That is not to say racism is not a problem in tech, but it is by far a pipeline problem by a huge margin. As a member of a minority who has experienced a lot of racism, I will say that for tech specifically, the racism/sexism problem is overblown. If you don't trust my anecdotal experience then google which race has the highest average income in the United States: Asians.
>Not everyone enjoys the luxury of being able to focus on school and extra curriculars from 14-22.
Be
"Most people don't get to enjoy the luxury of being able to focus on school and extra curriculars from 14-22." ?
However, having been in predominantly Chinese and Korean social circles, I have had more than a few conversations on the subject and have observed quite a bit of racism towards Asian-Americans.
The racism I've seen against Asians from whites is primarily mistrust, not fear. A racist hiring manager is likely to look at you and think you'll do good work for the company, but they'll have to keep an eye on you. I think it's rare that racist idiots look at your skin and think you're dumb, lazy, and violent.
I think the racism against black people in the U.S. is different both in kind and degree vs. the racism against persons of East Asian or South Asian decent.
As far as dating, as a white guy over 6 feet tall, I've run into a lot more Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating guys over 6 feet rather than Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating white guys. Maybe that's a common convenient lie because it's more politically acceptable. However, at least 2 of them later married 6-foot tall Chinese guys, and I think the majority were being honest about their preferences.
If you're smart, went to a top school, and have a good job, most Asian cultures will tolerate a lot of nerdiness out of you.
I agree this exists but I think most white people in general are just really afraid of being called racist and would never consciously do something racist. Overall, I think the racism that is most prevalent in Tech is subconscious. White people have a bias towards white people that they aren't aware about... that's all. Most white people keep friends that are also by majority white and likely they did not choose that outcome deliberately. So yeah, a "racist" hiring manager might keep an eye on an Asian, but they will likely not be aware they're doing it based on race. Again, not saying this is 100% the case and there are definitely people who consciously discriminate, but I believe that for the majority of white people, it is subconscious. I don't know your opinion on that, as a white person I'm sure you may have a better perspective.
>However, having been in predominantly Chinese and Korean social circles, I have had more than a few conversations on the subject and have observed quite a bit of racism towards Asian-Americans.
Racism is prevalent for sure, but again, I was just emphasizing a very specific thing: the lack of diversity in tech. I'm not saying racism doesn't exist. But for diversity in tech I believe it's mostly similar to the pipeline problem for ballerinas. There is an extreme lack of males trying to become ballerinas... I think we can both agree that the disparity exists not due to extreme sexism by females trying to put a complete stop on all males from entering the industry.
>I think the racism against black people in the U.S. is different both in kind and degree vs. the racism against persons of East Asian or South Asian decent.
It is different, no question. However I would say that the a great portion of the differences in treatment actually stem from a generalized reputation that is an exaggeration of very real statistical difference between races. You may look at a random Asian stranger and a random African American stranger and predict the Asian stranger is more affluent. This assumption isn't just a baseless stereotype... it stems from an actual statistical reality. Asians are statistically more affluent than African Americans. Is it racist to make predictions about individual people based off of probabilities? We use probability to predict all kinds of outcomes for all kinds of things... but it becomes immoral when we use it on race? I have no answer for what's the right way to deal with this moral conflict, but I feel it is important to pose the question nonetheless.
>As far as dating, as a white guy over 6 feet tall, I've run into a lot more Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating guys over 6 feet rather than Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating white guys. Maybe that's a common convenient lie because it's more politically acceptable. However, at least 2 of them later married 6-foot tall Chinese guys, and I think the majority were being honest about their preferences.
There's a very real race thing going on here. Just watch that video I posted, those women are clearly talking about race, not height. There's other videos as well...:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52dQSX-DCN0
While most women do have a huge bias for height and white males tend to be taller than asian males I do believe there is a separate phenomenon going on here in terms of race.
And in the context of dating and sexuality, it might well be the biological differences that are relevant.
Few people care about sex but not gender.[1][2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attraction_to_transgender_peop...
I don't think your sources support that statement. For example, [2] says:
> Surprisingly, among the 127 participants open to dating a trans person, almost half selected a trans person of a gender incongruent with their stated sexual orientation. For example, 50% of the trans-inclusive straight women and 28% of the trans-inclusive gay men were willing to date a trans woman, even though one wouldn’t expect either straight women or gay men to be attracted to women. Similarly, 50% of trans-inclusive straight men and 69% of trans-inclusive lesbians said they’d date a trans man, even though both groups are presumably only attracted to women.
This suggests that for between 28%-69% of people, it is the persons sex rather than their gender which is important for their sexuality. This result is unlikely to be due to transphobia as these are people have specifically indicated they would be interested in dating trans people.
The article says "even though both groups are presumably only attracted to women". It seems to me that this presumption is simply wrong. For many people, their sexuality is defined by sex and not gender.
29% of lesbians said they would date a trans person. 38% of 29% only said yes to trans men and 31% of 29% said yes to both.
The article doesn't have the same information for straight people but only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men said they would date a trans person at all. So 0% of gay men, 11% of lesbians, maybe 0.9% of straight women, and maybe 1.7% of straight men would consider sex but not gender. Probably the real percentages are lower. Probably some straight people said yes to both. Many straight men attracted to trans women wouldn't date one.
Porn with trans women is much more popular than porn with trans men. The primary demographic for porn with trans men is gay men[1] even though at least 10x as many men are straight.
The other studies also found few men only attracted to trans women and cis men.
[1] https://www.ibtimes.com/transgender-porn-best-seller-it-good...
What about immigrants that arrived to the US with a suitcase and $100 in pocket?
We do. All the time. It's why half the shit we work on is covered in a thick layer of technical debt and the other half is written in self contained microservices.
A software stack from a company that's been around long enough is going to be more random, redundant and glued together than the processes in our evolutionary biology.
One guy I had to talk down from having his car detailed (150 bucks) vs paying the 2 month late car payment. He literally did not think of the idea of they will take the car away from you if he did not make the payment, until I pointed it out to him. He was very fixated on the 'clean the car'. That is but one small example. I have hundreds of examples like that.
That short term thinking is absolutely acidic long term on you, your family, and friends. It can create a spiral that is very hard to get out of. Being poor costs substantially more long term as well. I as a wealthy person can buy things ahead of time when on sale because I know I will use them in the future. Being poor means you buy in the 'now'. You do not buy for the future because you do not have the means to do so. So on average simple things cost you more. But being in the 'now' can hurt you even worse by giving you fun vs not fun choices. But not being able to see you have been give an bit of 'luck' to make your future better.
The trouble is that the way out is not easy. We can no longer keep talking about "you're at a disadvantage because you're born into x." Even if it's true, mentally it paints a victimization culture that brings people down. If you tell someone the major of their problems are due to their class, or the history of their people, or police or some other bogeyman (both real and imagined), how are people going to see a way out?
We can't keep blaming. Maybe the narrative needs to be, "Yes, the scales are not as fair as they could be. Maybe they're super unfair. But fuck em. Show them what you can do, and don't stop until you beat them at their game!"
I don't know if that's naive or overly simplistic, or if it's just some form or noble lie or noble truth.
A lot of it is luck too. My father grew up during a war, his family lost everything and had to start from scratch. He made it through University where his two brothers struggled to learn English. They all grew up in the same situation, and he's told me he didn't know what made him different. Higher IQ? Stronger drive? Who knows.
Yeah it is. But if you model it as a statistical likelihood and you start two populations at different distributions you would see how long it would take for them to "catch-up" as a group.
What you're telling people is "keep at it, you'll get there in a couple decades". Meanwhile the disparity continues, leads to more prejudices (because yeah, statistically they're poorer/underrepresented) and counteracts some of the "pure luck" gains.
In any case, you’re acting like this is a sure path to a good life. It’s not. It’s a cultural trope.
Those immigrants also didn't have seggregation laws against them until the 70s...
Arguably untrue, ask a Trump voter of your choice about whether they think Chinese or Latino looking people are inferior to whites...
> seggregation laws against them until the 70s
All the SV hiring we are talking about is people born in the 80s and 90s. How are those worse off than the SE Asian or middle eastern first/second generation immigrant who also possibly gets racially stereotyped in some places but doesn't have preferential privileged college admissions and special scholarships?
They are not. There you have your answer.
I would posit you have created a 'hallucination trump supporter' that does not exist.
[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/shoag/publications/long-run-caus...
Hardly the same as 400 years of slavery, and 150 years of Jim Crow, lynchings, redlining, racism, seggregation, and so on...
What about them? You haven't given the reader anything in the way of argument yet; you've just pointed at another group.
* have the ability to pass the legal immigration process of the US if they weren't citizens
* have the courage and drive to fight for a better live by abandoning their status-quo situation and move to another country
For at least 10 years all big companies have "equality & inclusivity" departments that are taking care of giving equal opportunities to "oppressed minorities" members. Is that just PR or something substantial?
The conclusion ("one generation lives in the environment without discrimination") doesn't come from the premise (that affirmative action was introduced 30 years ago).
Yes, affirmative action was introduced 30 years ago. But it hardly put an end to discrimination (among other reasons, because even if affirmative action was great, well applied and totally effective, discrimination is not constrained in the domains that affirmative action affects).
The issue is that D&I had no power to do things that actually matter. I've complained to D&I teams before and they really exist to placate people internally because leadership will never change. When something gets out that seems like a bad PR problem ("twitter"), then the leadership team will take acute action and fire someone and pin it on inclusion.
It's a bad system for everyone but it's born out of cyclical system where white people do nothing about racism until it reaches some breaking point, then they insist on taking immediate action to "fix it" for a month, then they go back to the same old.
This is not particular to companies either. People most affected by offshoring will support offshoring by buying cheap goods produced by offshored work ensuring a positive feedback loop that will come and get them.
If companies were forced to develop local talent because they cannot short circuit the labor market, they would.
>Lastly, I suspect the beef some poorer whites have is that they too have been discriminated against due to poverty and they feel that another group now has a leg up on them and that discrimination against them isn't acknowledged.
What is needed is to break down issues caused by racism from issues caused by poverty and fix each on their own. Fixing an issue caused by poverty (which itself may be a result of racism) as instead having been caused by racism means the solution is not correctly targeted.
If we target the problems caused by poverty based on poverty instead, you would have a solution that will help minorities more as they need more help, but at the same time help non-minorities who are in poverty and prevent resentment from building that ends up harming the attempts to fix those inequalities.
For issues directly caused by racism, solutions would be based on race (but race should likely be replaced by race and ethnicity, as I've personally seen racial equality initiatives forget that Hispanic whites face injustice very similar to racial minorities, despite the technicality of being racially white.
Last, fixing issues of race, class, and gender (which I haven't mentioned but which should work the same) discrimination should be seen as the starting point, not the goal. These are the big three that cause people the most discrimination, but are not the only three. As they are big three, they should have priority, but others shouldn't be forgotten. For example, discrimination based on LGBT+, on disability, on looks, on height, on neurotypicalness, and other factors still exist in our society: in private life, school life, and professional life. The goal should be that once the inequality from discrimination on the big three are reduced to the size of the level of discrimination these other factors cause, they too become a focus (and to be more pedantic, it wouldn't occur all at once as these other issues are by no means equal, such as LGBT+ discrimination being one of the largest forms of discrimination once you take race/gender/class out of the comparison).
For example, unequal understanding of career possibilities is a common side effect. I had a favorite class in middle school where a professional (in my case an accountant) would come to our class every two weeks to teach us about their profession.
I think many more members of the tech community should do the same. Furthermore, they should serve as ongoing contacts for the kids such as providing opportunities for internship, for tech presentations, etc...
We need to do this not just for the urban poor but increasingly for the rural poor as well.
"Adding to the insult, [Will] Hayes finds himself at a distinct disadvantage in meetings that open with a case of mistaken identity. Venture capital is based on relationships, and investors aren’t typically primed to write a check when they feel unsettled. “You see it in the body language, you see it in the lack of questions and engagement,” says Hayes, 39. “They can’t wait for this meeting to get over.”
For nearly four years, Hayes would attend investor meetings alongside [longtime colleague] Messick, the former chief marketing officer at Lucidworks. VCs are trained to look for patterns in startup founders, Messick says, and there aren’t many Black Mark Zuckerbergs. 'Years and years of a Black guy and a White guy walking in the room, and the White guy is the CEO,' Messick says. 'Whether malicious, whether negligent, it was always awful.'"
Here's the post: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/16/for-black-ceos-in-sil...
How many non-black Zuckerbergs are there?
So to answer your question in the manner in which it was posed:
Most or nearly all of the Zuckerbergs are non-Black?
Isn't it well studied that homogenous environments are more trusting?
It may be that homogenity (and thus stronger interpersonal bonds) helps in that initial startup phase where everyone knows eachother.
If Zuckerberg ever runs for public office, he’s going to get sued if he doesn’t put the CEO hat down while in office doing official duties.
I personally think he should run just so he’s forced to answer unscripted questions live on tv. Much like the upcoming Congressional inquiries. Very interesting times.
You say that about zuck running for office but you've got Trump in that exact seat right now. He's forced to answer unscripted questions on TV and it makes no difference whatsoever. None.
It will matter to Zuckerberg personally because he doesn’t seem to rate well with some people, which isn’t necessary, but helps you get elected, generally. He seems to really care what people think about him in a value-neutral “we’re all just talking” kind of way, which actually isn’t a bad approach, but I want to see how he does live on stage with professional debaters. That’s essentially what Congress is these days: modern sedate mortal combat for American lives in our Colosseum, battles put on for the rich and famous while everyone else watches and cheers, watches and jeers, or scalps entry coins out front.
https://depts.washington.edu/chidint/journal/2015/03/glory-h...
Poorly communicated on my part then. I was alluding to "one too many Zuckerbergs" - in my opinion _any_ Zuckerberg (in terms of a single individual being totally in charge of something like FB) is one too many.
Jeff Bezos: $114 billion
Bill Gates: $106 billion
Warren Buffett: $80.8 billion
Mark Zuckerberg: $69.6 billion
Larry Ellison: $65 billion
Larry Page: $55.5 billion
Sergey Brin: $53.5 billion
Michael Bloomberg: $53.4 billion
Steve Ballmer: $51.7 billion
Jim Walton: $51.6 billion
I went to a predominantly black city college right next door to Georgia Tech, so we got plenty of big companies knocking on our door.
Only they never took us seriously, gave rushed presentations, and never collected resumes. Tech? They got parties, dinners, entire clubs rented out. It was posh, and if you were like me - you figured out ways to get into these exclusive events, evade bouncers and find an engineer just to talk to them.
There are a few people in this comment section talking about how 'minorities and women simply skew differently'. Maybe try walking a mile in our shoes
Nobody has any trouble understanding that Duke is a higher-priority recruiting target than A&T.
I don't think I really agree that visiting HBCUs is racist tokenism unless it is 100% just to get diversity brownie points and nothing else: it's still better than not visiting them entirely and to provide opportunities to underrepresented minorities for which, while the intent is to put them into the corporate grinder, having a high-paying tech job is still a material benefit.
Without seeing how they treated students at a similarly ranked non-HBCU, it's difficult to distinguish racism from colorblind elitism. It's probably a bit of both racism and elitism, but without a comparably ranked school for comparison, I wouldn't be comfortable using the word "definitely".
This is exactly why you can't reasonably accept treating one group of people differently - it might be a lazy recruiter half-ass'ing their job, but it might also be actual real racism. There's no way to tell by looking. The outcome is the same.
If you're willing to give them a pass you might just be enabling a racist.
A. What you'll have to do will depend in how finely you divide your population. E.g. recent african immigrant vs. Slave descended are quite different demographics with different life trajectories and you'll be able to tell one from another very easily. There will be huge political fights over these categories.
B. If you do hire based on population demographics then two things will happen: You'll get a bit more inefficient workplace due to unperforming workers. But more importantly, you'll be surrounding people with a bunch of Xers (whichever the underperfoming demographics is. Hillbillies? African Americans? Republicans? Left handed folk?) who are underperforming. This will cause a strong association in their mind that X=less capable. Xism will then increase.
The influx of women to my workplace really didn't help my colleague's sexism.
You think your employer shouldn't aim to be increase the diversity of your team because that'd make you racist?
Certainly the students should have been treated with much more respect. Multiple people clearly confused priority and respect. The two student bodies should have been treated with equal respect, but we can understand why they might not get equal priority. However, there's not enough evidence to rule out plain elitism for the lack of respect.
Besides, I do not really get why those dog&pony shows still exist in the first place.
You may have answered the question yourself. This is just a guess, but perhaps some employers see business value in those performances.
To provide special treatment is elitist at best, and racist and exploitative for PR points at worst.
And if the entire school doesn't pass the "hiring filter", stop going, and stop making false claims.
"Cisco, at least at a time did invest in A&T and NC State, far more so than UNC which it didn’t recruit from for a period."
Of course, there are no examples of elite black-dominated universities abutting poor white technical colleges, so it's not possible to look for an anecdote in the opposite direction here.
There's plenty of historic and systemic racism that keeps black people poorer and less educated. That's where people's outrage should be focused.
I pushed so hard for my employer, Sexy Unicorn Startup which said all the important things you expect a woke company to say, to recruit there. I told them I would set everything up and that all I needed was a budget. I got nothing but lip service.
So, HN, you want to do it the right way? I can be on A&T's campus in 15 minutes. I will connect you with the student orgs and help you do it the right way. You won't regret it. Email is in profile.
However, I really like the positive action of this comment.
First off, big feeder schools, the Dukes and UNCs of the world, they have extremely sophisticated internal career programs that throw out the red carpet for us when we arrive. Yes we order the food (and its usually pizza), but they literally do all the pre-work and advertise for us, give us the floor and make sure we have the best chances to meet their students. They schedule the program and the times for us, so we just roll in, present, and then have lots of meet and greet with the students.
Second, recruiters only have so much time and energy to meet with students, so they have to go to places with the least friction. The recruiters live by the rule, meet that quota or you're out! So that translates to, schools better have students who can pass the interview process, or they are out.
My company has a huge list of diversity schools that we actively recruit from. This goes against the rules above and requires special recruiters who aren't being tracked against the same quota system. Why? Although these diversity schools produce highly qualified candidates, their career programs aren't sophisticated enough, nor is the coursework aligned with the goal of getting these students into silicon valley tech jobs.
Remember, at a very real level, you're competing for the same jobs at the same level as someone graduating from CMU or MIT. If your CS department isn't preparing you for what's ahead, you have to make that knowledge-gap up on your own.
Change isn't free - the question is if companies are willing to spend time and resources for it. Every time a company does this, they have put a price on their acceptance of the problem. For some companies that's a needed survival choice. There are many that are choosing to not fix the problem and instead focus on Wall Street numbers or similar, even though they clearly have enough profit/funding to invest in this societal problem.
Most likely, yes. In the US news rankings, Duke is #10 and UNC is #20. NC A&T is #281.
NC A&T has a 46% graduation rate vs Duke's 95%.
Duke engineering is ranked #20, NC A&T is #134.
These schools just aren't in the same league.
"Hooli didn't treat a low ranked school as well as they did an extremely high ranked school, must be racism."
I could agree that more recruiting resources should be dedicated towards higher ranking schools, but food scraps and half-hearted presentations just for PR points falls wayyy below just "lower resources".
Would you rather just not have a company show up, or have a recruiter essentially treat you like a dog?
* Research reputation
* # of publications, conferences, books
* # of citations
* # of highly cited papers
Where's quality of teaching? Where's student employability after graduation? Where's numbers of student internships? Where's teacher to student ratio? None of these matter to most university ranking lists.
Duke student-faculty ratio is 6:1. NC A&T is 18:1.
Duke is #17 in Best Undergraduate Teaching. Seems for NC A&T that info is paywalled.
Duke is #8 in Co-ops/Internships. This might also be paywalled for NC A&T.
Duke acceptance rate is 9%. NC A&T is 61%.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/duke-university-2920/ov...
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/north-carolina-at-2905/...
To teaching:
> The Best Undergraduate Teaching rankings are based solely on the responses to this separate section of the 2019 peer assessment survey.
So you have a bunch of high up academic deans being asked to rank teaching at hundreds of schools. This just boils down to name brand and is not a representation of teaching quality.
Same goes for the methodology for co-op's/internships if you read up there. It's all a self fulfilling prophecy of prestige.
Class size, yeah that's a real metric, but there are a decent deal of large schools with known CS programs with large classes near that 18:1 - why haven't those been eliminated from recruiting?
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/university-of-michigan-...
Can you provide evidence of this.
> Structural racism runs deep.
What makes you think Duke is some all-white club. I went to Duke and there were lots of African-American students. My guess is that Duke has among the most Affirmative Action of any school.
Partly because to deny structural racism is itself racist therefore strengthening ones case innately, but mainly because as it does really exist so there would always be some influence and something that's in the news right now so it's a fashionable concept to attach any blame on.
Also it gives good social credit to mention it in case people with power over ones career or future question one. It really is a no brainer, we should use it more often.
I'm not being sarcastic here, the benefits of blaming structural racism for complex causes far exceeds any costs of not doing so.
I’ve experienced a small example of this. In elementary school the majority minority school in the district sent basically no kids to the gifted magnet school. Like zero. For years, people just said what you said. My parents actually dug into it and found that grade distributions were similar and the problem was that administrators at the white schools knew how to write glowing recommendations and the admin at the other school didn’t exaggerate as much. A little bit of coordination and adjusting the recommendation letter form structure and bam suddenly way more kids from the majority minority school.
But for years people just said “well that’s a worse school, what do you expect”.
There was resistance. My mother was hated by other parents for this and two other pieces of local activism. People in church told her that she was hurting their children straight to her face.
Most probably, someone forced them to have this box.
GC is saying it was more likely elitism, which is not the same thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23935650
Or do you think those students are just stupid?
They seem clearly bogus in that they're by English-speaking press and happen to rate all the English-speaking universities top.
And if they're dumb in that way, probably they're dumb in other ways I haven't thought of too, right?
Is there some real signal in there?
USNWR only ranks US universities. It’s not a world ranking. It doesn’t even include foreign in passport only Canada.
It does make my criticism irrelevant in this case, good point.
I'm not sure that's a useful measure in the direction you think it is.
I have a few friends in academia here in .au - where the higher education system has been systematically defunded by a series of governments on both sides to the extent they're pretty much totally reliant of foreign students paying "full fees". I've heard stories of teachers being told they will be fired if they do not pass foreign student - even if their course attendance makes it blatantly obvious they can barely speak/write english and their handed in course work is blatantly plagiarised and/or ghostwritten. "Not failing" enough students looks a lot like poor academic standards and/or practice from where I sit.
(And it's quite likely a signal of endemic institutional racism as well. Duke don't enroll "the sort of student" who doesn't get private tutoring or who needs to, for example, work a part time job to support themselves through college. Which is why they're not a "HBCU"...)
It’s Duke. They’re internationally known. Against some no-name state university. Of course they’ll try harder for the Duke students. It doesn’t matter if it’s Idaho State University, Oregon State University, or NC A&T, it’s not on the level of Duke.
Amusingly, that's exactly what the "interactive" ADA process is at my workplace - just a check box. I submitted a request with medical diagnosis and links to several third party expert recommended accommodations for it, an HR rep booked a meeting with me, told me in the first sentence that I'm requesting an accommodation I didn't request, and that she's denying it, then the meeting ends, and she writes up an email lying saying I requested something I did't and that they rejected it. All appeals are just met with the claim that I didn't state what accommodation I want clearly, even though I sent links ahead of time to reputable sites listing them.
Never realized that's what it must feel like as a minority to get brushed off and ignored due to who you are.
- leftover food. Really? This is really shitty behaviour; I am all for reuse, recycle; but this is neither the time nor the moment
Independent of that: - I do not know much about US-Universities, so I checked. Duke is US Top 10, and A&T is not in the Times ranking since it is >600. So to me calling A&T "and a damn good one." is just delusional. Maybe it is a 'not so bad one', but I think things (quality of the University) can only improve if one is willing to see the truth. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I don't get the ranking system either; it's education, it should be uniform, everyone should get the same opportunities and education and their diplomas should be "worth" the same, instead of it being a pissing contest where the higher ranked ones are only accessible to the rich and those in the "in" group. The US is lacking social mobility in part because of this.
But that’s delusional, right? Of course diplomas won’t be the same because colleges cluster kids of similar intelligence and motivation. As has been pointed out on this page repeatedly, the kids at Duke are smarter and more motivated than at a typical school, so as a result, the diploma is worth more. And to pretend that Duke is only accessible to rich whites and Asians is a fallacy. I had lots of friends from poor families who had lots of aid and minority friends - the Duke campus is far more diverse than the country in general.
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-...
Financial related:
Faculty resources 20% "Expert opinion" 20% Financial resources 10% Alumni giving 5%
Academic related:
Outcomes 35% Student excellence 10%
Cisco or whoever may have been stopping by NC A&T to tick a box and therefore treated it perfunctorily. The author might also be exaggerating, it's certainly in his/her best interests. We all might do well to avoid drawing any conclusions from anecdote.
The author was trying to put it on the same level as Duke/UNC in order to paint a picture that the only possible reason for the perfunctory treatment was racism. But NC A&T is not on the same level. "Hooli" is almost certainly elitist, but this anecdote is not good evidence for systemic racism.
Author here. I wasn’t implying that A&T is perceived to be as “prestigious” or highly ranked as Duke. I’m just trying to say that it was certainly worth visiting and worth taking seriously. If you’re looking for black engineers, for whatever reason, it’s reasonable to reach for A&T. Now, you can’t claim a pipeline problem if you’re pretty much ignoring the places where you’re most likely to find your target demographic.
Let’s just drop the words “racism” and other “-isms” since they seem to trigger people and become distracting from the point. What the recruiters did by phoning it in for A&T and focus on Duke was miss out on potentially excellent engineers from A&T and reinforce the demographics found at Duke/UNC. The recruiters made an assumption based on some model they built at Hooli and other companies like it and didn’t do their job, which was to FIND good talent.
I’ve worked at “elite” companies with people from “elite” schools. I’ve also worked with people from no school. There are smart people all over the place, so we don’t need to look at the same 10 schools and ignore the people who didn’t take out a $75k student loan.
That being said, you could say that recruiters might "miss out on excellent engineers by not visiting _____", where the blank is any one of thousands of schools in the US. In this particular case, it seems like an instance of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" – in general, a recruiter is just gonna look better if they recruit talent from top-rated school than from lower rated ones.
To me, the solution is to stop recruiting on college campuses in general if the job in question doesn't actually require a degree in order to perform it.
I just think there’s not enough pressure on these companies to rework how they do interviews, since nobody believes that they’d actually get higher quality candidates.
In general there's an extremely strong belief in the bay area that it's not worth considering graduates of schools outside the top as being worth considering.
That's how you end up with entire companies treating the entire middle of the US as "flyover country."
The answer is probably complicated. I'd guess that India pushing tech in their education system is one factor. Indians and Asians are also a numerous and growing cohort, whose families are immigrating from higher populated regions. Their families may also encourage their children to go into tech. And the racist stereotypes these populations face are likely very different than others, such as African Americans.
It's that if you are Indian, you will not be allowed into the US unless you have a bachelor's in something leading into some high paying occupation. In fact, your odds are pretty bad unless you have a master's from an American university.
For Indian and Asian Americans, “their country” is the USA, and especially for Asian Americans, it's not uncommon that was true of their ancestors for several generations.
A large majority of Asian Americans are foreign born. The only groups that aren’t majority foreign born are the Japanese and Hmong.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/22/key-facts-a...
This is absolutely not true for "majority." A significant minority of them, this is probably true about, but a cursory review of how Chinese-Americans arrived to this country will probably dispel this rumor fairly quickly.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-c...
Because for Indians and other Asians, doing well in tech is one of the main ways of becoming Americans. If we kicked out all the current black people and then had employment-based immigrant and dual-intent visas as the main route for blacks to enter the country and start the road to citizenship, then once there were Black Americans again, they'd seem like a pretty darn successful demographic.
4% hold a doctorate, 17% a Master’s, 37% a Bachelor’s.
https://www.nairaland.com/5968663/nigerians-top-most-educate...
All career paths is probably a bit of a strawman. I doubt you'll find anyone here who expects same number of men and women in every job. The more dangerous ones will always be disproportionately picked by men and that's ok.
Yes, rich people can put their children through test prep courses. However, the differential impact is much less than what they can do with grades or even worse, extra-curriculars.
A bright, economically disadvantaged teen can do very well on a standardized test. That same teen has no way of doing an impressive non-profit over the summer in another country, as many wealthier Ivy League applicants do.
People get upset about the idea of unconscious bias (I suspect they resent the implication that they're secretely racist or sexist) but it's very real. It doesn't have to involve the person's identity. Bias creeps into your decision-making when you're having a bad day, or when the candidate reminds you of a person you don't get along with, or when they just rub you the wrong way for some reason. It's very easy to dress it up as objectivity. You're just grilling them on the technical details, holding them to the company's high standards, being a bar-raiser, something like that. The reverse is also true - you cut people slack because you like them without even realizing what you're doing.
Recruiters devote the most time to candidates they think have the best chance of getting through the interview process. The interview process tends to be bullshit and easily gamed. Industry candidates who have proven an ability to make it through a similar hiring process will be given preference over those who haven't. Student candidates at schools who know the score will be given preference over those at schools that don't play ball.
Referalls cause a slew of problems. The way hiring decisions are made cause a slew of problems.
This may come off as bitter. I am bitter - not about being rejected, but rather about the people I've had a role in rejecting over the years. Industry candidates who were obviously good at their jobs but terrible at the interview dance. Student candidates who were obviously smart and ambitious but only became aware of the types of questions they would be asked a week or two before the interview. Working with and reporting to cruel and selfish people who excelled at an interview process that's so convinced it's objective and meritocratic that evaluating soft skills isn't even considered.
It's so widely understood and accepted that software hiring processes are bullshit, but for some reason the minute people start talking about the impact of that bullshit on diversity... "it's a pipeline problem."
For the record I think university rankings are stupid, and the college application process is certainly no meritocracy (an unremarkable high school classmate of mine got into Duke with a 3.4 GPA despite being rejected at our state's lower ranked state schools - she came from a family of Duke alumni). But it doesn't surprise me that companies engage in this university elitism, as sad as it might be.
> Pipeline problem, my ass.
after spending exactly no words refuting pipeline issues. I'm left to conclude that the author feels the two explanations are mutually exclusive and that by giving an anecdote about one, you can determine the other isn't real.
So it is not about rejecting the existence of a pipeline problem, it is instead to reject this as an excuse to ignore other real problems.
That is likely what the author was trying to say.
Duke University: 10th
North Carolina A&T: >600th
While the author tries to frame the university as "a damn good one", in reality it probably isn't.
The treatment looks to me like people (or the firm) felt obligated to show up but not obligated to put much effort in or to expect to recruit anyone. If they are running a recruiting event with little expectation of recruiting, does that not agree with the article’s view that the event was solely paying lip service to diversity.
a) being visited and disrespected
b) not being visited at all
c) being visited and treated with some respect
All the bad historically white universities wouldn't get an event at all.
What, exactly, do you think my class of CS grads should do when recruiting?
Apply like regular people and pass the interviews.
Nevertheless if the details of this story are true this company might have well not bothered visiting.
Whenever I set a benchmark for tone-deafness someone eventually swoops in and makes me re-evaluate it.
Techies are so coddled that the very idea of interacting with a person with a wildly different background and communication styles is anxiety inducing, so they find a way around it.
The slights won't stop until you leave the comfort bubble, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
You're saying recruiting from different backgrounds (e.g. small town god fearing republican) could give my developers anxiety?
Hmm...
Guess I better avoid recruiting those sorts then.
Turns out they were there to recruit drivers to drive for Uber.
Uber did attend the career fair for the CSE department however to recruit software engineers.
So, you'd think that management in my group (at least) might consider panning for additional nuggets in the same stream (top performers at lower-prestige schools), right?
No.
The hiring manager did recruiting trips where he wanted to travel. New York. Hawai'i. Etc.
He'd hire one candidate from each locale, apparently to justify the trip. Attractive female candidates didn't even have to meet the official policy constraints (a Sociology degree is not CS, engineering, or even BA, sir).
Eventually, I got recruited elsewhere not by any standard channel but by a personal friend.
Not everyone is born into resources. I had to both support myself and put myself through school. That constrained my choices and forced me to be resilient in ways peers my age didn't need to be. Employers who hire by formula completely omit my kind.
So what I don't get is, if everything else is equal between two candidates except for a) their contribution to value and b) their group attribute, how is it that so many actors choose b and leave a on the table thus knowingly performing poorer for shareholders and risking failure at the hands of competition purely because of a group attribute bias?
I get that there would be some actors that would choose bias over value. But how is that no one break ranks. Wouldn't there have to be a massive amount of collusion and coordination to make sure that every founder and manager from every entity all agrees to do this? Because anyone that breaks from the mold would end up benefiting financially.
I get that this perspective undermines the popular narrative, so go ahead and down vote if you think my intention is to do that. But that's not my intention. What I'm looking for is a rational description of how the economic mechanics work with a popular narrative about bias against what is also a popular narrative that humans are greedy?
The story in the article about how the Duke university students were wined and dined, given direct recruiting contacts and wooed, and the A&T students were given the previous days leftovers and NO recruiter contacts isn't some aberration. It's happening right now, this year, literally leaving all that talent on the table.
I might butcher this, but there’s an excellent part in there where he takes a look at the papers that showed discrimination in sports and how teams that discriminated less, actually had an advantage and performed better. For decades, teams were hiring less qualified white players and actually were leaving money on the table. Looking at sports data is nice because there’s tons of it and it’s easier to evaluate “employee performance”.
The issue with ignoring those NC A&T students was that those recruiters didn’t even bother evaluating them to see if there were a few rockstar developers in the group. Had they given them a fair shot and evaluation, we might have made better hires overall.
If they put forth a half-assed effort at a “lesser” school I have a feeling the best and brightest at that school would feel that and be less than receptive about working there. Meaning they only get serious inquiries from less-than-stellar recruits leading hiring managers to feel that school isn’t worth more effort.
If I show up to dates in pajamas it seems odd to come to the conclusion that my dating pool doesn’t meet my standards
You could swap out UNC and NC A&T with "Ivy League" and "State School" and you would effectively get the same story. And yes, 100% there are tech companies who put a premium on Ivy League vs non-Ivy League based on my own personal experience with recruiting.
Dan Luu (mentioned in the original article) has previously talked about this along the lines of (paraphrasing): "I went to #25 of the top 25 schools. Friends of mine, who were better potential hires, went to #26 and got substantially fewer offers and the offers were lower quality".
If there are biases in how companies treat you based on solely the university you went to, I find it easy to believe that there could be other biases as well.
This statement is exactly the sort of attitude that needs to be thrown out the window if we want to make real progress addressing the racial gap in tech.
Inability to figure out why IQ might be correlative with engineering ability (as it is with practically any performance measure you can name, reified by over 100 years of exhaustive data) is indicative of a failing of reasoning on your part, not a problem with the argument.
I do agree with you that in order to address the "racial gap" in tech we would have to ignore most metrics that would predict tech aptitude.
Go on, read Moneyball, and consider that the selection criteria from top-ranked universities may be low-quality indicators of success at actually getting things done.
Is the point then that there just aren't many Blacks? Are Asians in the tech industry not part of the "minority" in the context of this conversation? Sorry but I'm losing track too quickly of what is even being discussed.
Also, diversity isn’t only about race, although it is also about that. It’s also about equal access. @AccessForAll on Twitter can probably help you much better than I can in that area.
Go out of your way to find underrepresented people (small town girls?) but raise the hiring bar slightly to accomodate for the interviee process error bars (if you're looking at a larger sample with a lower average using an error prone measuring device you'll get more people over the bar due to measurement error).
It's a hierarchy building system that works but of course it's not perfect.
If you are presuming that untapped talent exists in lower ranking schools on a large scale, companies would shift their recruiting strategies because people from top schools require much higher starting salaries. Leading companies recruit from top schools to remain in the front.
The hypothesis that some groups (black, women, lgbt, etc) are systematically marginalised is not compatible with capitalism. While it has an element of truth due to the in-group preference (which a very natural phenomenon - even trees do it) in a ruthless market companies which discriminate are at a loss - they loose star employees and eventually their leading position. If huge untapped potential exists in the marginalised groups this would create a market opportunity: companies could only hire from these groups and outperform the others. I don't see this happening.
"Historically black colleges and universities"
I graduated from State. What exactly about the tier of my undergrad and myself should I know?
Since you asked me, for some reason: that none of the rest of us are worried about it, and that some random unnamed company not recruiting there might not be something you need to worry about.
If you're worried the rankings which place Duke above your school are incorrect and you believe your CS program was as rigorous and useful as what the Duke students have, I can understand being frustrated by that. File under "life isn't fair."
I don't think anyone is going to defend the company in the story, for all the obvious reasons.
I didn't get into Duke. I'll remember that day for the rest of my life.
> You seem to tie your self worth to college prestige.
The fact that you seem to bring this up often makes me think you do too. It's honestly unnecessarily cruel.
From what I’ve seen there is a real difference in the rigorousness of the top 5/10 CS depts and then everyone else is relatively the same at large state universities.
See police brutality, me too, etc.
Today though? It does not fly. People know about it, and if they are not actively participating in stopping it, they are complicit - "not my problem, I don't care, blue/all lives matter, what about these crime statistics, muh freedom", these are all people that know about it but do not care, or they do care but they're on the wrong side.
However, like you, I am way of anecdotes and put more faith in empirical studies [1]. So what do the data say? Turns out they align with the lived experience of the author: widespread hiring bias by employers hurting Black people.
Note, when looking at this literature: there is a huge publication bias. Publishing a paper that fits the popular (in social sciences) narratives is easy, publishing one that goes against them (like the one I linked) is hard and may well be career suicide. Also, the bar for what constitutes good enough science in these areas is very low.
The Occam’s Razor explanation for this is that the popular narratives are popular because most available evidence supports them.
The file-drawer effect is real and multifaceted, including political narrative strategy. If you don't think that editors consider this aspect of maintaining their journals' reputations, you are simply naive.
That seems like a bit of abuse of Occam's razor. Narratives are popularized by the general media, not scientists. Just compare how popular the idea that IQ is meaningless and not heritable is amongst the general population and the media compared to those who actually study the topic full time at universities.
Universities and people in them are not immune to pressure. Wasn't Hsu fired partly because he funded research into police shootings that ended up getting a politically incorrect result?
Authors of unpopular results (Rind et al anyone?) often get attacked a lot, their research subject to a disproportionate level of scrutiny and it's very career limitting (or is at least rumoured to be, which is plenty of a chilling effect).
Cesario and Johnson studied fatal shootings by police. Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings. That was only a small part of the case the graduate employee union presented against Hsu. The letter started by faculty[1] didn't mention it at all.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jb7w02E5GAdrJ_QnAokp7Ier...
I don't want to get too down into the weeds as my point is that people and the media have a big influence on what science gets done and what is career limitting. That said:
Most of the "case" was nonesense, with the actual letter (which had a fraction of the signatures of the counter-letter) being mostly guilt by association.
> Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings.
It was relevant because Floy was a police killing. Racial bias in police killings (the vast majority are with guns) was the main thing the protestors I've heard were protesting.
Only a small fraction of the signatures supporting Hsu have any affiliation with his university. And would you care which petition had more signatures if it was the other way around?
The protesters' demands for equity and police accountability aren't limited to fatal shootings or even all killings.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/racial-discrimination-americans...
Also sensitivity training isn't the best name. It practically writes its own insults. Maybe call it something like diversity promotion or anti-racism training. It's a lot harder to opt out to anti-racism training.
We all have blind spots. We need to erase them. Let's do it together.
And it doesn't smell right that an organization would risk giving a bunch of candidates food poisoning and getting a lawsuit by serving them day-old catered food. I'm certainly willing to believe it could happen, but 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' - in this case I'd settle for him giving the name of the company so that either others can confirm, or they can rebut.
Attacking the person who is bringing the issue to light makes it seem like one is trying to distract from the issue being brought up, and put blame on the individual for talking about the problem.