Hacker News Reader

Comment by oldmanjay | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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'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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com