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I see. Your point is a qualified minority is going to find a job anyway. That's a really interesting way to look at it. It's a really good point too. Thank you

I see. Your point is a qualified minority is going to find a job anyway. That's a really interesting way to look at it. It's a really good point too. Thank you for sharing. This is certainly true in SV and many other cities. However, top tier companies are criticized for not discovering and attracting qualified minority candidates. I want these candidates to have a shot at the best jobs. Going back to our original conversation about referrals. A referred candidate gets preferential treatment. If a company is entirely homogenous then few minority candidates will benefit. On the other hand, I have noticed that underrepresented candidate are already treated better. Of course there might still be biases and other things against them but that's not what we set out to discuss. Yes, the pipeline is a large problem. Retention is too. I think there are many things our society should fix. The EEOC example is an extra incentive for companies to try harder to expand their candidate pool. Some companies are entirely white which is a little odd because I expect to see at least a few Asian programmers. In my experience most people who point at the pipeline problem are lazy. But you clearly are not and I want to thank you for this conversation.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago
> Some companies are entirely white which is a little odd because I expect to see at least a few Asian programmers. It's actually not that unexpected. If you take a majority-white population and distribute employees completely at random then you would expect to see several companies that are entirely or almost entirely white, because random is not the same thing as uniform. And then there are several benign things that tend to create clusters, like geography. (There is a lower proportion of Asians local to Boston than San Francisco etc.) Diversity doesn't mean every company has every group in exactly the same proportion as the general population. That isn't diversity, it's uniformity. The only way you get that level of uniformity is authoritarian decree. Diversity is so much messier than that because natural diversity is a derivative of Darwinian forces. It doesn't care about made up unscientific nonsense like race, so the distribution of "races" in a completely egalitarian society is not uniform, it's completely arbitrary. > In my experience most people who point at the pipeline problem are lazy. Probably most people who point at the pipeline problem can see it plainly but don't know how to fix it. If you sit down in a computer science class your classmates might be 16 white men, 10 Asian men and one Asian woman. After four plus years of that, try to be shocked to hear that the industry doesn't employ very many black women. The "problem" with the pipeline problem is that it doesn't have a center. There is no single thing that causes it and no organization responsible for it. So it's easy to point to it, because it's real, but how do you fix it? Pass a law prohibiting high school girls from ostracizing their peers who spend time learning about computers? It's a big problem but not an easy problem.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago

> Some companies are entirely white which is a little odd because I expect to see at least a few Asian programmers. It's actually not that unexpected. If you take a majority-white population and distribute employees completely at random then you would expect to see several companies that are entirely or almost entirely white, because random is not the same thing as uniform. And then there are several benign things that tend to create clusters, like geography. (There is a lower proportion of Asians local to Boston than San Francisco etc.) Diversity doesn't mean every company has every group in exactly the same proportion as the general population. That isn't diversity, it's uniformity. The only way you get that level of uniformity is authoritarian decree. Diversity is so much messier than that because natural diversity is a derivative of Darwinian forces. It doesn't care about made up unscientific nonsense like race, so the distribution of "races" in a completely egalitarian society is not uniform, it's completely arbitrary. > In my experience most people who point at the pipeline problem are lazy. Probably most people who point at the pipeline problem can see it plainly but don't know how to fix it. If you sit down in a computer science class your classmates might be 16 white men, 10 Asian men and one Asian woman. After four plus years of that, try to be shocked to hear that the industry doesn't employ very many black women. The "problem" with the pipeline problem is that it doesn't have a center. There is no single thing that causes it and no organization responsible for it. So it's easy to point to it, because it's real, but how do you fix it? Pass a law prohibiting high school girls from ostracizing their peers who spend time learning about computers? It's a big problem but not an easy problem.