Behind Silicon Valley’s Self-Critical Tone on Diversity, a Lack of Progress | Hacker News Reader

Behind Silicon Valley’s Self-Critical Tone on Diversity, a Lack of Progress

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

15 pointszt19 comments

an industry built on the legends of the self-starters is now under near constant attack for not offering helping hands to people who demonstrate no actual interest in being a part of it aside from wanting a piece of the pie. I'm not even sure why I should care, frankly. it's not like a uniform distribution of skin tone and genital structure is going to improve things in any technical sense. this is all meant to soothe the emotions of hand-wringing observers.

Hmm, that actually may not be true. Recent research has shown positive correlations between succesful businesses and diversity of staff. (Of which a few quick ddg searches have not found me the paper for, although I think my wording was poor.)

I don't know if you're in the software industry but ever team I've been on (and that's quote a few) has been stuffed with Chinese and Indian men and women. So the diversity is there, just not the kind the NYT et al seem to want.

It's not helping hands that's needed, it's the removal of factors that actively discourage participation in tech culture for arbitrary reasons of race, gender etc.

And it's not hand-wringing, it's anger at watching people who would otherwise be substantive contributors in a technical sense be subjected to abuse until they leave the field.

I see the lack of diversity at these companies as a sign of distortion in the overall tech community - the reason they're having a tough time getting the diversity they want is because so many people have been discouraged long before they develop the chops to apply at a place like Google.

You neatly listed every talking point we've all heard a thousand times, but framing the debate using your preferred rhetoric doesn't address any of my points.

The "removal of factors" is a helping hand. The expression of anger is the hand-wringing. And the lack of diversity is a lie - no engineering team I've seen lacks Asian and Indian men and women.

Being discouraged to achieve your dreams is not exclusive to people of "color" (suddenly I'm transparent?) or the "minority" of women. Perseverance is a character trait that successful software engineers need. Giving up because there are barriers to success is a signal that can't be ignored, frankly.

The way that women (for instance) are treated in tech forums is frequently outright abusive. My anger at that is not a talking point, it's real. And your last two sentences are the equivalent to "it's not a problem, tough it up", which is a big part of how things got this bad in the first place.

The number of women in technical roles today at Facebook is 15%, at Google it's 17%. A similar figure from, say, IBM in the 1980s would be 35-40%. The genetic predispositions of women have not changed in the last 30 years, the difference is cultural.

You feel that the way you'd like things to be is under "near constant attack". Good. Because the status quo in tech culture is far from meritocratic, and people who defend it clearly don't realize how much damage it's done, and how much talent we've wasted on its account.

Your last point doesn't follow from the first two. You describe artificial barriers but fail to take into account job-specific differences that attract and repel certain genders and races. I think that the pushback on this topic is largely due to this last point. It is reasonable to expect equal opportunity but it is unreasonable to expect equal headcount.

If it truly was built by self starters then you'd expect the makeup of Silicon Valley to reflect the rest of the country. Yet it doesn't. Do you think there is something inherent in the genetic makeup of white men that makes them more able to self start? If not, it's worth examining why more diverse groups haven't been able to match that success.

I'm not sure why I would expect a group of successful self-starters in software to reflect the "diversity" of the country. There's no particular reason to believe that

> Do you think there is something inherent in the genetic makeup of white men that makes them more able to self start?

"white" men are actually a bit UNDER-represented in these companies relative to the country's population at large.

That is, unless you're choosing to count asian and indian engineers as "white". (And if you ARE doing that, why not count black and hispanic engineers as "white" too - problem solved!)

I have always thought universities should have a mandatory get to know available majors day. Everyone knows Business and Social Science (the majors that fall under these) but there are majors such as construction management, soils management, and yes even computer science that a lot of people don't really know about. Along with this should be the employment rates and avg salary.

I say this as I randomly took a construction management course maybe my last year of college just to see what it was like. Nearly all the students (all male) had a family background in construction. They knew about the major before coming to college.

Will the gender ratios change dramatically? No but at least give students a chance to really understand their options. This is especially true of students who first generation college students, who would tend to be black/ recent immigrant hispanic.

On a variety of fronts -- lack of diversity, broken management, work/life balance, etc -- the standard Valley tech startup communication strategy (both public and internal) seems to be acknowledging the problem while doing little to solve it.

It's a clever strategy, because it's quite different from what the Fortune 500s tend to do, which is pretend the problem doesn't exist. If you acknowledge that the problem does exist, you get points for being honest, and moreover, transparency about the existence of problems is often a strong heuristic for those problems being solved. In other words, a communications strategy of, "we know this is messed up and we're fixing it" inspires a lot more confidence than, "problem? what problem?".

Tech companies get away with being shitty places to work (long hours, politics, misogyny deeply embedded in culture, etc) for one main reason -- they are growing quickly. Growth is the mission, and meeting growth goals is a kind of perpetual emergency, much in the same way that in totalitarian countries the revolution is always still in progress.

Speaking firsthand from past experience at a privately held "unicorn", and secondhand from many friends' experiences at others, the tactic of using quarterly town halls in which the CEO gets up and says, "I know things are really messed up and you're all working too much and we don't have enough women or people of color and we need to refactor our management because most of you don't know how well we think you're doing or what your career options are if you stay here and .... " is pretty widespread. This strategy makes employees -- who are usually pretty smart people -- believe that everything is going to be better soon, because they want to believe it, just like they want to believe that their options are going to be really valuable one of these days. After all, their company just raised another private round at an 11 figure valuation.

Nietzsche observed that madness in individuals is rare but in parties, groups, and eras it is the rule. I think a lot of this stuff is going to look pretty ridiculous in a decade or two (to the extent that it doesn't already).

It seems that the failure is in education for minorities in inner city neighborhoods. If minorities tend to live more to urban neighborhoods is it a surprise we continue to see this problem downstream? What is AppleGooFace doing to solve the underlying issues?

That's obviously not the problem with women. Women are more numerous and, on aggregate, do better as college undergraduates than men. There's no excuse for that not having a large impact on hiring.

It is therefore also possible that bias, if not exactly racism, factor in to the lack of progress on minority hires. There's a lot of room for the employers to try harder, before they can blame the education system.

My computer science classes had an average of 98 boys to 2 girls. It seems to me that the problem may be a lot more systemic than hiring bias.

well you would have to convince females aiming towards medical or legal careers to go into tech.

"sorry suzy I know you realy wanted to be a vet or a lawyer but those courses are over subscribed - its CS for you"

Eh, I've got a radical theory for why women don't sign up to take computer science classes. It's because they don't want to be nerds. Can you imagine what their sorority sisters would say?

I think the problem not in tech giants, it's much deeper: schools, colleges etc. If large groups of people don't have (or don't want) access to education that's the problem that must be solved.

It looks like achievement in games, seriously.

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