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The clickbait article headline is "Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?" The answer is buried three quarters of the way into the article: > When they

The clickbait article headline is "Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?" The answer is buried three quarters of the way into the article: > When they started interviewing seniors, companies found — as Pratt did at Howard — that many were underprepared. They hadn’t been exposed to programming before college and had gaps in their college classes. So why isn't the article titled, "Why Aren't Enough Black Coders Prepared for Silicon Valley"?

michaelborromeo 11y ago
Based on my experience interviewing a handful of developer candidates graduating from Howard, not being prepared is the best way I can describe the impression they left. It felt like they only had a smattering of CS courses, none of which pushed them very hard. In other words, they should fix their curriculum.
- blueatlas 11y ago
  Is this really a problem specifically with Howard, or more a problem with CS curriculum in general? I ask this leaving the likes of CMU, Stanford, MIT, out of the equation - I'm thinking more about the "non-elite" CS programs, of which there are many, many more. I am mentoring a CS student at another university and have had some challenges bringing this student along because the fundamentals are just not being taught. I took some time to compare it to Howard's curriculum, and I see some really practical courses offered at Howard - a 1 credit intro to OO and Java, Unix Lab, etc. Not that these make one a computer scientist, but when hiring entry level kids out of college, I would expect these skills to be somewhat solid, and that is not the case with really any CS programs today.
  - HarryHirsch 11y ago
    I cannot speak for CS, but for chemistry I would not hire anyone who did not graduate from a top-20 program. At any other college, both theory and practice are taught with insufficient depth and rigour - in essence everyone who joins one of those programs either is a medical school aspirant or just there for the "college". CS may be different.
    - hobs 11y ago
      That sounds like the same technique an HR person would use for hiring, not someone looking for skill in an individual.
    - Joof 11y ago
      I can't speak for chemistry, but this is a horrificly shitty thing. There are many factors influencing what schools a student chooses to attend. Finances being an important one.
      - HarryHirsch 11y ago
        College choice is a problem, especially for first-generation students and those whose families aren't well-off. There are students who could do much better than Tumbleweed State, but they didn't pick the nearby Ivy because they it never crossed their minds that they could have gotten in. There might have been a decent financial aid package. If there wasn't one, who can risk debt in this economic climate. But I can't fix the world. It's not my fault that at non-top-20 colleges they fail to teach basic things.
        diyorgasms 11y ago
        This is one of the most horribly elitist comments I think I have ever seen on this site. Cost is a huge consideration for prospective college student, especially since the onset of the Great Recession. Furthermore, quality education is available at (I would estimate) most institutions of higher learning. It's just that the students have to do some research to find out who the good professors are at the less prestigious schools. I think you are doing yourself, your company, and the graduates of less prestigious institutions of higher learning a great disservice being so dismissive toward "lesser" schools.
        maxerickson 11y ago
        For people that can get into Harvard or Yale, they will be among the cheaper options, at least as far as tuition. Especially people that aren't coming from wealthy families, as their need based aid programs will pay 100%.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    > Is this really a problem specifically with Howard, or more a problem with CS curriculum in general? I ask this leaving the likes of CMU, Stanford, MIT, out of the equation - I'm thinking more about the "non-elite" CS programs, of which there are many, many more. You shouldn't leave the elite programs out of the equation. I've helped to interview a good handful of people who went to elite institutions and had done difficult, important work, but couldn't answer our interview questions correctly. We don't even use hard interview questions, just three that expect you to know some tricks-of-the-trade for systems programming and basic processor architecture.
- mcguire 11y ago
  This is a problem for essentially every liberal arts school I've looked at.
Animats 11y ago
This seems to be the same problem as women have in Silicon Valley. If you didn't spend a lot of time with computers on your own before college, you're not in the running. Up until 1985 or so, that wasn't the case, because few people had pre-college access to much CPU power. More women were going into computer science then.
- rntz 11y ago
  Do you have anything more than anecdata for the idea that "If you didn't spend a lot of time with computers on your own before college, you're not in the running."? I've heard that idea in a lot of places, but it's never matched up with my personal experiences. I did my undergraduate at CMU, and plenty of the better programmers there I knew hadn't done any programming before they came to CMU. But of course, this too is anecdata.
  - emcq 11y ago
    Ones man's anecdotes are anothers statistics. I haven't seen any data driven evidence for this, but let's use a thought experiment: would you expect it is more likely for professional athletes to come from a background of playing sports and being active from a young age? I think most people would say yes except to play devil's advocate. Becoming a top caliber athlete requires years of conditioning, experience predicting trajectories of fast moving targets, ability to read your competitors, mental fortitude, flexiblity, and more. Why would we expect a field that prides itself with top caliber professionals in a competitive environment to be any different?
    - rntz 11y ago
      Are teachers, accountants, mathematicians, scientists, doctors, or lawyers known for practicing to get into their respective fields in elementary & middle school? Not so much. Even for the most demanding fields, we expect them to begin to specialize only in their high school years. To my mind, the fields which are known for requiring training from childhood are sports and the performing arts (music, theatre). And if I had to guess, I'd speculate this is less because it's intensely difficult to play sports or learn to play music, but because so few people can become professionally successful in these fields (there's only room for so many sports/music/film stars). CS doesn't have this problem (the demand for programmers is skyrocketing), so we shouldn't expect folks who learned to program in childhood to have any more than a mild-to-modest advantage.
rntz 11y ago
This is a misrepresentation of the article's position. The article's actual, more ambiguous, position is better summarized in another paragraph: > People tend to discuss Silicon Valley’s diversity problem in binary terms. One camp says companies are biased against underrepresented minorities, or at least aren’t trying hard enough to attract them. The other says there aren’t enough people from these backgrounds who are qualified for positions—or at least who are good enough to beat those Stanford grads with all the programming trophies and internship experience and Mozart-like childhoods. The reality is, both are true.
- grok2 11y ago
  This sort of assumes that it is everyone's job to try hard to attract underrepresented minorities. That's expecting way too much noble-mindedness of people. What employment tends to optimize for is good capable employees in general. If the pool does include qualified and capable minorities, they will get employed in most cases (and racial bias will likely be there only in a minority of cases -- atleast in Silicon Valley). Just employing token representatives from under-represented minorities will only perpetuate the problem (special if the token representatives end up performing poorly if they were employed not for their ability but just to represent a minority). What will help is to have a large pool of minority group grads to select from.
  - hawleyal 11y ago
    I think you are exaggerating how much merit is taken into account during interviews.
    - grok2 11y ago
      Perceived merit, not necessarily actual merit. I think in every interview, how much ever you sneer at it, the people employing will prefer someone who can do their job than someone who will end up needing support to do their job. They may include their bias later, but they still will look for people they perceive to be capable of doing the job they are hiring for.
kenjackson 11y ago
That's not clickbait though. It's a reasonable title for the article. Your may be closer to the truth, but the original title is completely valid and the article's content addresses the issue fairly. It's not clickbait.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Are they less prepared than people graduating from the hacker schools (or whatever they're called) that are popping up guaranteeing jobs?
Spooky23 11y ago
Because recruiters are lazy. They cherry pick colleges and build relationships over a period of years. Then they decide that they need more black people, so they send someone to man a booth at a historically black college and expect the same level of polish. (Which is mostly BS) I had the same experience as a graduate of a mid tier public college. Finally a recruiter from a big company laid it out for me -- they have a list of schools they recruit from, period unless you are referred.

michaelborromeo 11y ago

Based on my experience interviewing a handful of developer candidates graduating from Howard, not being prepared is the best way I can describe the impression they left. It felt like they only had a smattering of CS courses, none of which pushed them very hard. In other words, they should fix their curriculum.

blueatlas 11y ago
Is this really a problem specifically with Howard, or more a problem with CS curriculum in general? I ask this leaving the likes of CMU, Stanford, MIT, out of the equation - I'm thinking more about the "non-elite" CS programs, of which there are many, many more. I am mentoring a CS student at another university and have had some challenges bringing this student along because the fundamentals are just not being taught. I took some time to compare it to Howard's curriculum, and I see some really practical courses offered at Howard - a 1 credit intro to OO and Java, Unix Lab, etc. Not that these make one a computer scientist, but when hiring entry level kids out of college, I would expect these skills to be somewhat solid, and that is not the case with really any CS programs today.
- HarryHirsch 11y ago
  I cannot speak for CS, but for chemistry I would not hire anyone who did not graduate from a top-20 program. At any other college, both theory and practice are taught with insufficient depth and rigour - in essence everyone who joins one of those programs either is a medical school aspirant or just there for the "college". CS may be different.
  - hobs 11y ago
    That sounds like the same technique an HR person would use for hiring, not someone looking for skill in an individual.
  - Joof 11y ago
    I can't speak for chemistry, but this is a horrificly shitty thing. There are many factors influencing what schools a student chooses to attend. Finances being an important one.
    - HarryHirsch 11y ago
      College choice is a problem, especially for first-generation students and those whose families aren't well-off. There are students who could do much better than Tumbleweed State, but they didn't pick the nearby Ivy because they it never crossed their minds that they could have gotten in. There might have been a decent financial aid package. If there wasn't one, who can risk debt in this economic climate. But I can't fix the world. It's not my fault that at non-top-20 colleges they fail to teach basic things.
      - diyorgasms 11y ago
        This is one of the most horribly elitist comments I think I have ever seen on this site. Cost is a huge consideration for prospective college student, especially since the onset of the Great Recession. Furthermore, quality education is available at (I would estimate) most institutions of higher learning. It's just that the students have to do some research to find out who the good professors are at the less prestigious schools. I think you are doing yourself, your company, and the graduates of less prestigious institutions of higher learning a great disservice being so dismissive toward "lesser" schools.
        maxerickson 11y ago
        For people that can get into Harvard or Yale, they will be among the cheaper options, at least as far as tuition. Especially people that aren't coming from wealthy families, as their need based aid programs will pay 100%.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  > Is this really a problem specifically with Howard, or more a problem with CS curriculum in general? I ask this leaving the likes of CMU, Stanford, MIT, out of the equation - I'm thinking more about the "non-elite" CS programs, of which there are many, many more. You shouldn't leave the elite programs out of the equation. I've helped to interview a good handful of people who went to elite institutions and had done difficult, important work, but couldn't answer our interview questions correctly. We don't even use hard interview questions, just three that expect you to know some tricks-of-the-trade for systems programming and basic processor architecture.
mcguire 11y ago
This is a problem for essentially every liberal arts school I've looked at.

Animats 11y ago

This seems to be the same problem as women have in Silicon Valley. If you didn't spend a lot of time with computers on your own before college, you're not in the running. Up until 1985 or so, that wasn't the case, because few people had pre-college access to much CPU power. More women were going into computer science then.

rntz 11y ago
Do you have anything more than anecdata for the idea that "If you didn't spend a lot of time with computers on your own before college, you're not in the running."? I've heard that idea in a lot of places, but it's never matched up with my personal experiences. I did my undergraduate at CMU, and plenty of the better programmers there I knew hadn't done any programming before they came to CMU. But of course, this too is anecdata.
- emcq 11y ago
  Ones man's anecdotes are anothers statistics. I haven't seen any data driven evidence for this, but let's use a thought experiment: would you expect it is more likely for professional athletes to come from a background of playing sports and being active from a young age? I think most people would say yes except to play devil's advocate. Becoming a top caliber athlete requires years of conditioning, experience predicting trajectories of fast moving targets, ability to read your competitors, mental fortitude, flexiblity, and more. Why would we expect a field that prides itself with top caliber professionals in a competitive environment to be any different?
  - rntz 11y ago
    Are teachers, accountants, mathematicians, scientists, doctors, or lawyers known for practicing to get into their respective fields in elementary & middle school? Not so much. Even for the most demanding fields, we expect them to begin to specialize only in their high school years. To my mind, the fields which are known for requiring training from childhood are sports and the performing arts (music, theatre). And if I had to guess, I'd speculate this is less because it's intensely difficult to play sports or learn to play music, but because so few people can become professionally successful in these fields (there's only room for so many sports/music/film stars). CS doesn't have this problem (the demand for programmers is skyrocketing), so we shouldn't expect folks who learned to program in childhood to have any more than a mild-to-modest advantage.

rntz 11y ago

This is a misrepresentation of the article's position. The article's actual, more ambiguous, position is better summarized in another paragraph: > People tend to discuss Silicon Valley’s diversity problem in binary terms. One camp says companies are biased against underrepresented minorities, or at least aren’t trying hard enough to attract them. The other says there aren’t enough people from these backgrounds who are qualified for positions—or at least who are good enough to beat those Stanford grads with all the programming trophies and internship experience and Mozart-like childhoods. The reality is, both are true.

grok2 11y ago
This sort of assumes that it is everyone's job to try hard to attract underrepresented minorities. That's expecting way too much noble-mindedness of people. What employment tends to optimize for is good capable employees in general. If the pool does include qualified and capable minorities, they will get employed in most cases (and racial bias will likely be there only in a minority of cases -- atleast in Silicon Valley). Just employing token representatives from under-represented minorities will only perpetuate the problem (special if the token representatives end up performing poorly if they were employed not for their ability but just to represent a minority). What will help is to have a large pool of minority group grads to select from.
- hawleyal 11y ago
  I think you are exaggerating how much merit is taken into account during interviews.
  - grok2 11y ago
    Perceived merit, not necessarily actual merit. I think in every interview, how much ever you sneer at it, the people employing will prefer someone who can do their job than someone who will end up needing support to do their job. They may include their bias later, but they still will look for people they perceive to be capable of doing the job they are hiring for.

kenjackson 11y ago

That's not clickbait though. It's a reasonable title for the article. Your may be closer to the truth, but the original title is completely valid and the article's content addresses the issue fairly. It's not clickbait.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

Are they less prepared than people graduating from the hacker schools (or whatever they're called) that are popping up guaranteeing jobs?

Spooky23 11y ago

Because recruiters are lazy. They cherry pick colleges and build relationships over a period of years. Then they decide that they need more black people, so they send someone to man a booth at a historically black college and expect the same level of polish. (Which is mostly BS) I had the same experience as a graduate of a mid tier public college. Finally a recruiter from a big company laid it out for me -- they have a list of schools they recruit from, period unless you are referred.