Is Silicon Valley Racist? | Hacker News Reader

Is Silicon Valley Racist?

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12 pointsnotifyneal7 comments

I assume notifyneal is a brand new user, not located in SV??? You sound a little uniformed and here's why:

The beautiful thing about the internet world is that you're not judged on your face/race/religion. You're judged according to what you can produce???

A better more reliable approach to the "data" your gathering would be to find out what percentage of Software engineering students are black/white/asian/hispanic and find out if there is a substantial deviation represented in the larger community.

and i know you're a user who created his account 96 days ago; hence you're a genius because you're a three month user of a platform somebody else built. you've really made something of yourself, and i congratulate you. let your tombstone read, "here lies gamechangr the person with an awesome ycombinator account!"

it's a question based on stats I found on the internet. answer it, or get a life... period.

Sure notify:

You're right. I don't consider myself an expert on HN at all. I was truly trying to be helpful, as I could tell you were wandering into an ongoing conversation that you didn't know existed.

I have seen similar topics about SV (sometimes it's there are too many people from India, not enough women, age discrimination against 50 year olds, Europeans not happy with immigration).

I actually DID answer it, so Let me give it another try:

No. Silicon Valley is not racist. Not at all. They would hire an eskimo if he could produce something promising.

Have you had a negative experience in SV that you would like to share?

I wish I had enough karma to down vote this. It's just a bunch of random semi-related statistics thrown together into a infographic. Yes, Silicon Valley is "racist" in the sense that it aims to hire people who have been trained to do certain jobs that minorities are usually NOT trained to do. But this infographic does nothing more than muddy the waters with meaningless facts and poor logic.

Transcription of the statistics presented:

According to CNN: Half of the faster growing jobs are in the tech industry and black unemployment is the highest it's been in 27 years.[0]

Median amount of funding for internet start-ups in the US: All-Black founding team: 1.3 million All-White founding team: 2.3 million[1]

Distribution of internet company founders nationally: 87% white, 12% asian, 1% black.

Tech industry booms again (somewhat unclear what the following means exactly, assumed it was change over time): 16% increase of work force of SV's 10 largest companies, 16% decrease of black workers within those companies, 11% decrease of Hispanic workers within those companies.[2]

U.S. Population: 12.8% black, 15.4% Hispanic, 71.8% other SV Employment Population: 1.5% black, 4.7% Hispanic, 93.8% other

Filmmaker Andrew Wilson .... [3]

Technology problems related to race[4]

Comments:

[0]: Obama is president and gas is going up. My water bottle isn't full and it isn't raining outside. Apple is giving back money and I don't own an iPhone. Putting two potentially related facts together with an "and" really doesn't prove a point.

[1]: What about the average team? Why is this all-black vs. all-white only?

[2]: What about the overall movement for black and hispanic workers in Silicon Valley? What if they are all starting their own companies? Also, what is the time period for this? Last six months? Last six years? Last six decades?

[3]: Actual video: http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/private/portfolio/4j7e/704...

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500082

[4]: What if it is harder for cameras to detect people of color in low light environments than pale white people? Is this more likely than a systematic and purposeful degradation of technology when used by people of color?

You actually can't downvote submissions at all. Your only option is to flag it.

Well said!

Underrepresentation != racism/sexism/any other -ism

The overwhelming majority of carpenters are male. Does this make carpenters' unions sexist? Of course not.

I'd hire a talented developer even if they had green or purple skin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com