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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> People have been capable of coexisting in social situations without an explicit CoC for millenia.

People have been excluding minorities and disadvantaged groups for those same millennia. Your argument is almost verbatim that of antivaxxers who argue "people were fine before vaccines!" while ignoring all the evidence that people weren't.

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A code of context exists only to deal with people who are causing problems. Everyone else scans it once and then goes on ignoring it because they never run into problems.

The only people who should have a problem with a code of conduct are those who don't want to contribute to the culture as everyone else is.

Can you point to where this is happening more than the after mentioned over-sensitive, reductivist prima-donnas issues? ( I mean in the context of our industry )

Dongle Gate / Pronoun Gate / Opal Gate... whats next?

Let me guess: I'm an asshole for asking for proof.

Sigh.

Do you believe that our industry employs black people (a demographic, which, at least in the US, have been fairly clearly historically discriminated against, until the passage of legal codes of conduct) at a rate commensurate with their relative skill and interest compared to non-black people?

http://insights.dice.com/2014/11/11/african-american-it-pros...

http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/tech-diversity-d...

http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-24.pdf

You'd think a look at employment rates of science and engineering graduates, as seen in your third link, would help, but because of affirmative action that data's kind of spoiled.

OK, sure, but in the absence of affirmative action, are black high schoolers going into science and engineering programs at rates commensurate with their aptitude and interest compared with non-black high schoolers?

Obviously we're a bit off-topic from codes of conduct at the moment. But the specific claim I was responding to was that minorities and disadvantaged groups are not being excluded from CS today in the same way as they have been marginalized from society for millennia. You can draw a fairly straightforward line of causality from imperialism and slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow to, e.g., why fewer black kids in elementary school learned programming in the '90s via their parents' UNIX account from the local university and reading their parents' textbooks (which is how I originally got into CS as a child, and I've heard similar stories from several of my peers).

Why then are overproportional so many Asians in IT? They are most often similarly coming from an immigrant background and had no "parents with a UNIX account".

Our industry is relatively young, and to reduce your inputs just to "our" industry is a horrible idea. We can learn a lot from history.

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