23 ms·

Tech Companies and Diversity Hiring

87 points by jameshart 10y ago

lonefermion 10y ago
I don't know what to say
ReadingInBed 10y ago
One critical point I feel this piece does not touch on is how diversity of experience is great in the workplace. It's a huge benefit as a developer (and obviously other professions too) to work on teams with people who have lived very different lives. The Mirrortocracy[0] covers this well, but it should be clear to us all that being exposed to different views helps refine our ideas and process. It's partly up to us to make diversity happen. We can prioritize offers that have diverse teams, and when we get a chance to hire to value diversity of experience. [0] http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html
- Tunabrain 10y ago
  I absolutely agree, though I always feel like culture and nationality are very underplayed in this discussion - I believe an American, an Eastern European and a Chinese national would bring a lot more diverse world views to the table than a female and a male American (or black and white).
- th0waway 10y ago
  as a counterpoint, take a group of singers - if they all sing their own song, chaos. Then, take of group of singers singing the same song in different keys: terrible music. Finally, take a group of singers singing the same song, in the same key: art. Diversity for the sake of diversity is no better than a group of people all singing their own song. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the only way to be great is to be diverse.
- tzs 10y ago
  > It's a huge benefit as a developer (and obviously other professions too) to work on teams with people who have lived very different lives. I can see how that would be true for some types of development, but there are also many type for which I don't see offhand how it would matter. For instance, if I were doing web design for my employer's shopping cart site I could see how having a diverse team could greatly help because the team would have people on it that are part of or identify with more of our customer demographics. I as a white male mid-50s atheist tall fat guy could easily inadvertently come up with a design that might turn off non-whites, females, young people or elderly people, religious people, short people, or skinny people. Even if I don't end up doing something to offend people, I could simply miss opportunities that people of other backgrounds might see. In fact, I've seen that kind of thing. I saw a company that was making CD-ROM caching software in the '90s find a nice cluster of sales when an employee who was also a Mormon pointed out that this software worked extremely well with the CD-ROM genealogy databases that were becoming quite popular among Mormons. Without that Mormon employee, they would have probably never noticed that Mormons could be a distinct market segment for this product that was worth specifically targeting. What I actually work on, though, is backend stuff like processing orders and subscription billing, interfacing to payment processors, reporting sales tax in the US and VAT in Europe, analyzing A/B tests, and so on. Would having a diverse team working on this actually produce any different results?
dlss 10y ago
It's quite surprising to me that Apple seems to be doing so much better at diversity hiring. I think Google, Facebook, and Twitter are quite serious with respect to diverse hiring / I find it hard to believe Apple's methods wouldn't be found out and copied by any of them if they worked so much better. Has anyone looked into the possibility that rather than Apple being uniquely good at diversity hiring, Apple is just uniquely good at gerrymandering their diversity report?
- toyg 10y ago
  Did we read the same post? The whole point is that they are not actually serious. There is a lot of lip service, but then diverse candidates in practice are stonewalled at every step: by location, by academic background, during evaluation etc. If they were serious, they could look beyond their institutionally-placed (and fairly arbitrary, let's say it) obstacles, like Apple did for his friend; but they won't, which means they are not serious.
  - dlss 10y ago
    Right, that's the thesis of the article. The basis for concluding that Google, Facebook, etc were not "actually serious" was their numbers being lower than Apple's numbers. I was asking if perhaps OP's data analysis was flawed because (for example) Apple might be counting Genius Bar employees as "tech" for the purposes of the diversity report... ie maybe Apple has the same difficulty hiring diverse candidates as Google for similar positions, OP's friend's experience notwithstanding.
    - saranagati 10y ago
      on top of that, apple is much more of a device company than the others. this means that they will have a lot more people on the technical staff that aren't developers and those other positions may have a larger candidate pool of blacks.
  - HillaryBriss 10y ago
    Yeah. Going further, another part of "being serious" is training and a demonstration of commitment to the employees after they're hired. Something like "Yes, this individual did not have a great education in youth because their local school district sucked. Nevertheless, this individual has potential. So we're committed to keeping this person on board and providing the necessary training. We will go to great lengths to make this person a useful and vital part of this company."
prostoalex 10y ago
Wouldn't "companies passing on highly qualified candidates due to a broken process" be a self-correcting problem, where other market players with non-broken hiring processes would be able to scoop the talent up and gain a competitive advantage?
- Larrikin 10y ago
  The author calls out Apple specifically and they are the most valuable company in the world.
  - prostoalex 10y ago
    Right. So eventually companies following Apple's lead will be rewarded, while the companies following a contrarian route will either adjust or disappear.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      In the long run we're all dead.
    - vec 10y ago
      "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." - John Maynard Keynes Over the very long run, this _will_ self-correct. That fact is cold comfort to someone trying to get hired today.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    They are the most valuable publically-traded company in the world.
  - beat 10y ago
    That's the whole point of the article, really... if Apple can manage 8% black representation, why can't Microsoft, Google, Twitter, or any of the other top-tier companies break 2%? It puts the lie to whatever excuses they make. Apple is clearly not "lowering the bar".
- 10y ago
adrianN 10y ago
Last I checked, the amount of black CS students in college is about the same as the as the amount of black software engineers.
- rando289 10y ago
  How do you check that? I've found reporting on race in tech to just be absolutely horrible with numbers. Whole stories where the only number is "Google repots X percent of Y race." It tells me absolutely nothing without comparing that to demographics of where google has offices, and what the demographics of cs students are, among other things, and I've never seen that info.
  - beat 10y ago
    The article addresses that directly. The author talks about Google more or less abandoning its Atlanta office, where a diverse workforce is easier to get than elsewhere.
- dareobasanjo 10y ago
  I'm honestly confused by your response. Companies like Facebook, Twitter & Google hire 1% blacks in tech and 2% overall. Blacks as a percentage of college graduates in engineering or non-engineering fields are way more than 2% of graduating classes. However most Silicon Valley tech companies under-hire from this demographic for their own reasons.
  - useful_intern 10y ago
    What is the percentage gtaduating from top universities? Then there's also the problem of university affirmative action which lowers the expected value of African Americans students compared to their peers
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Sacho 10y ago
    The numbers are confusing to me. Here's an article claiming that the amount of computer engineers is around 5% of all black college majors - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/report-few-black-college-students-major-in-high-paying-fields http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/report-few.... Now we need to make an implicit assumption that the enrollment and graduation rate of blacks is the same as the rate for the general population(I couldn't really find information on that, apologies). Using demographics data, blacks are ~15% of the overall population in the US. That means that about 0.75% of the total population are "blacks" && "engineer major". That would mean all the listed companies are overhiring black engineers if simply based on a college-graduate quota. Besides that, I liked the gist of your post, but the end seemed incredibly disingenuous. Correlating Apple's number of black engineers and its value does not imply causation, and that statement seemed like an emotional appeal.
feral 10y ago
To make a specific point, without prejudice to the main points of the blog post: >One of the open secrets of working in technology is that technical interviews are completely worthless as a predictor for whether someone is a good hire or not. [...] >> We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. > It’s amazing to think that Google found zero relationship between an interviewer saying “Hire” and whether the candidate was actually a good hire or not. The fact [the scores of someone who gets hired] are not predictive of their eventual performance, does not mean that hiring process is completely random, or worthless. In order to tell that, you would need to look at the cohort of people who were 'no hire' and compare them to the 'hire' cohort; it's not enough to just look within the 'hire' cohort. In other words, the hiring process is (1) designed to be a Classifier, typically tuned with an emphasis on having a low false positive rate. Hoping that (2) the scores of the small subset of candidates who are classed 'hire', also act well as a regression to the candidate's eventual performance, is a big additional ask. Just because there is evidence that (2) is untrue, or particularly noisy, does not necessarily mean that (1) is broken. I don't see a great way of solving this, without a large company like Google also randomly hiring 'no hires' from different stages in their hiring process (and subsequently measuring their performance) in order to quantify the performance of subsequent steps in the hiring process - not aware of anyone who has done that; it would be really interesting to read how a company who does that gets on, but an expensive experiment.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  > The fact [the scores of someone who gets hired] are not predictive of their eventual performance, does not mean that hiring process is completely random, or worthless. It does not automatically mean this, but it is a strong indicator. If the output of the classifier is not correlated with a given output sample it is reasonable to assume, in the absence of other data, that it is uncorrelated for other samples as well.
  - feral 10y ago
    I do accept it is evidence - but I don't think I would say a strong indicator, and it doesn't justify the strong conclusions made that the process is completely arbitrary. - It's imbalanced classification: there are going to be more rejections than acceptances; so you have less statistical power, to find if there is a real relationship, when you just analyse the acceptances. Even apart from that, class imbalance can unintuitively affect post-hoc inferences. - Scores are in context of the other candidates at a given level, and stage in the interview process, so are fundamentally already residual in some sense. - I'm willing to bet, from hiring I've seen, that scores are distributed somewhat about the 'hire/no-hire' bar, and that extremes are rare - the process is going to be tuned, implicitly in the organisation, to make that 'hire/no-hire' decision, rather than predict performance. > it is reasonable to assume, in the absence of other data, that it is uncorrelated for other samples as well I think that's a very strong statement: it's not a random sample, its explicitly concentrated at one end of the distribution. I do accept it is evidence, just not near enough to justify the conclusion the whole process is arbitrary.
fweespeech 10y ago
> This is where I’ll talk about the Big Lie from the title of my post. That lie is that there is some sort of pipeline problem preventing tech companies from hiring more black people. The reality is that tech companies shape the ethnic make up of their employees based on what schools & cities they choose to hire from and where they locate engineering offices. I agree this is a substantial part of the problem, particularly in larger corporations where they do target specific cities/schools. However, I'm not sure I can agree with the implication you should locate engineering offices based on the demographics as its the only way to fix the "cities where they locate their engineering offices". Demographic/diversity shouldn't be a criteria for office location. You shouldn't have to move your entire organization just because the city you happen to be in is ~5% Black and the largest minorities happen to be Asian or Hispanic. For instance at $Day_Job, the floor I'm on is 25% Asian, 5% Hispanic, 5% Black, 65% White. That is pretty much +/- 5% of the actual demographics. I wouldn't argue we lack diversity because we just follow the local demographics. I'd say the problem is when you are so out of whack with the local demographics it becomes absurd. For instance, an office in Atlanta that is 90% white.
- rando289 10y ago
  > Demographic/diversity shouldn't be a criteria for office location. Black cities are backwards and shitty and don't have CS grads, so no tech companies are HQed in black cities, but it's got nothing to do with race. I'm not racist: I'd have lots of black friends if they weren't all living in poor neighborhoods and jail where I don't go. We avoid logic and good data and good analysis of data when it comes to race, this post is at least getting a little closer.
  - fweespeech 10y ago
    > Black cities are backwards and shitty and don't have CS grads, so no tech companies are HQed in black cities, but it's got nothing to do with race. I'm not racist: I'd have lots of black friends if they weren't all living in poor neighborhoods and jail where I don't go. We avoid logic and good data and good analysis of data when it comes to race, this post is at least getting a little closer. http://atlantatechvillage.com/membership/current-villagers/ http://atlantatechvillage.com/membership/current-villagers/ Eh? There are plenty of tech companies in cities with large numbers of African Americans. I'm just saying you shouldn't try to imply that 100% of Tech Companies should move to Atlanta (for instance) solely because there are a large number of black people there. You should be in Atlanta because it makes financial sense for the business you are operating. I said it shouldn't be a criteria used to determine location. For instance, if you are doing eCommerce with a large import/export component, you are probably going to want to be HQ'd near a major port and you probably won't want to relocate any further than you have to (if you have to relocate at all) as a founder. There are plenty of places on the West Coast where the largest minorities are Hispanic or Asian, they have easy access to factories in China & Mexico, and have small Black populations. That doesn't mean they should relocate to Atlanta where they don't have physical access to the locations their merchandise enters the US. The Bay Area is another area where this is an issue but it doesn't make sense to move (i.e. If you want access to Silicon Valley): http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm The area is less than 10% African American. You aren't going to have more than 5-10% African American employees unless you are biasing things intentionally. The largest minority? Latinos followed by Asians.
Alex3917 10y ago
While there is more than adequate evidence of racism in tech hiring, it would be useful if articles like this included the expected percentage of X engineers if there were no bias in the hiring process. E.g. if the expected percentage of black engineers if there were no bias in the hiring process was 2%, that seems like important information to include.
- rando289 10y ago
  I can't remember a story like this without horrible data: numbers without much context from which no good conclusions can be drawn.
- woah 10y ago
  Well the proportion of blacks in the US population is 13%, so even Apple should be hiring twice as many to have a proportional representation.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    But that's not the number to look at for an article like this. The whole idea of pipeline problems is that you lose proportionality a little at a time, from early education to full time careers. Ideally, you'd check the proportions starting from something like mathematical success or career intent in high school. Then you move on to college majors, graduation rates, and applicant pools. This is really important, because otherwise you end up focusing energy on non-leaky parts of the pipeline and achieving nothing. This article focuses on interviewing, but the segment on black colleges and office siting is crucial. Ensuring unbiased interviews doesn't stop you from drawing interview candidates from disproportionately white colleges. Holding local code-ins won't save you from having offices in overwhelmingly white cities. "Lowering the bar", which companies are (according to this) hugely concerned about, still wouldn't solve the problem. If you're studying the mismatch between 13% of the population and 1% of your workforce, the numbers you want are the ones that show where things went wrong.
  - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
    I gaurantee you out of the people who can code or have cs degrees, blacks make up a much smaller percentage. You can't blame Apple for the deep societal issues we have that leads the average black person to be more likely to end up in prison than college
protomyth 10y ago
"I looked into it and it seems even after all these years the best way to get into Microsoft’s internship program is if your school is on the list of schools the company formally recruits from." This isn't unusual for technology companies. It isn't even unusual for research labs[1]. So, basically, the company has delegated its hiring diversity to a university admissions department. Worse, many universities only accept people into their graduate program from certain other universities. I've never heard of a recruiter from any of these golden schools visiting anywhere near me[4] Add to this ageism that is prevalent in technology and you have a the makings of lip service. Why is ageism problematic? Many minorities, particularly enrolled members of Native American tribes, go to school later than their white or Asian[2] counterparts. Many go into the military or need the extra time to sort themselves out. They typically go to a community college first (different path from average), then go to a university[3]. The school I went to was on Microsoft's list to hire only support people from. IBM didn't have that hangup and got one of the best developers I've ever known and it worked out fine for them. I would love to see these companies be a little wider with the hiring net, but I don't believe it will happen. They'll wring their hands and talk and release reports[5], but it won't change a thing because they don't get the basic problems. 1) in my youth I was refused for a summer internship because my high school and college were in the same area code.... 2) seems Asian isn't considered much except in the reverse of requirements - see the lawsuits against the California university system by Asian students 3) I'll leave the discussion on scholarships and students lying to get scholarships directed at certain minorities for a different time 4) hell, when I was applying in 1987, I had to travel to get the applications, pay the fees with money I really could have used, and never get a reply. Someone told me it was because, like everyone on the reservation I was from, I had used a post office box for my address. That seemed a bit far fetched to me. 5) I'll believe something might change when I see "enrolled tribal members" listed on their reports and a list of schools that includes ones that actually care about recruiting in diverse areas.
- zerohp 10y ago
  I don't know that ageism in technology necessarily means that older students are less likely to be hired out of university. I would be interested in seeing data to support that. As an anecdote, I have observed older students that attend the "right" school and achieve high grades are highly sought after by companies.
henrymercer 10y ago
"I used to attend Clark Atlanta University which was what is called a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) or colloquially “black college”. I picked up quite early on that getting good internships was key to landing a good job on graduation. I also quickly learned that hiring managers for “good internships” don’t come to black colleges looking for interns regardless of how good the students are. So I transferred to Georgia Tech, got that Microsoft internship 15 years ago and I’m still at the company today." Average SAT scores at Clark Atlanta University: 850 ( that is substantially below average, around 26th percentile) Average SAT scores at Virginia Tech: 1220 ( substantially above average, around 85th percentile) How many of the thousands of obscure colleges with better average SAT scores than Clark Atlanta does Microsoft recruit at? For example, does it recruit at some place like Oakland City University in Indiana (average SAT's ~950)? Seems to me like the tech companies are just recruiting where the most high smart/high SAT students are. One cannot infer racial bias from just looking at their failure to recruit at places like Clark Atlanta University. This might be unfortunate for the few high SAT smart kids at a college that is otherwise filled with mediocre students. But it would not be practical for Microsoft to recruit at every college. Conceivably, Microsoft or Google could give their own aptitude test directly, that would put applicants from any college or no college on the fast track for an interview -- but ironically, such a process would also be considered discriminatory -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
davidf18 10y ago
Companies should hire on the basis of merit, not skin color or sex. I did undergrad EE/CS at Illinois/Urbana and I don't recall any blacks in any of my classes at all. I've worked at high tech firms and never see black programmers/engineers. I've worked for a Wall Street bank and never saw black programmers/engineers. I've been to many tech Meetups and conferences and other conferences where software plays a major role but I've almost never seen black engineers/computer scientists. Some of the meetups / conferences I see few women, but I do see women in the aggregate, but almost never blacks and I'm in NYC where there are many blacks. I've been to Google Tech talks in the Google building in NYC yet never see blacks. Since the meetups don't require you go to "the right school" etc. and are free to attend it shows that there just are that many blacks that seem to be interested. Computer software and hardware are those areas where competence is extremely important. Hire on merit, not on other indicators.
- thelock85 10y ago
  So the lack of black participation in free tech events === lack of interest from black people? That's a stretch of a conclusion rife with confounding variables.
  - davidf18 10y ago
    Yes, as an approximation. Could you please explain in plain english with examples exactly what you mean by that statement? NYC where I live has at least 1 million blacks. NYC has many hi tech firms NYC has many banks and financial institutions and media groups that all employ programmers and engineers. It has many tech Meetups. It has many opportunities to attend tech events that are free, and where there are no restrictions on attendance. So, please explain what you mean.
    - thelock85 10y ago
      Where I can agree is that there are basic opportunities (e.g. networking) in the tech community that Black Americans may not take interest in. The stretch comes when you equate that to having no interest at all in technology (correct me, if I've misconstrued your point there). What makes it a poor approximation IMHO is that you place assumptions around how to "make in tech". "Not participating == not interested" assumes that there is some universally accessible and well-known path to working in tech. Now, if you are saying that you've taken advantage of all of those events/opportunities (from your OP) because one day you magically became interested without implicit/explicit involvement from role models, loved ones, inspirational teachers, etc. then I will concede your point... but that would make you exceptional IMHO.
scott00 10y ago
Some statistics helpful to put the numbers in the article in context: * Percent of San Francisco MSA that is black: 7.9% * Percent of Atlanta MSA that is black: 32.8% * Percent of college graduates that are black: 10.0% * Percent of CS college graduates that are black: 11.5% * Percent of engineering graduates that are black: 4.45% Sources: http://www.directemployers.org/2012/08/16/the-college-class-of-2013-current-demographics/ http://www.directemployers.org/2012/08/16/the-college-class-... http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/12_1YR/CP05/310M100US12060|310M100US41860 http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/12_1YR/CP...
- fwadfka 10y ago
  > * Percent of CS college graduates that are black: 11.5% The number I got for 2015 was 2.5% (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12101868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12101868) One of the key sources of this difference is whether you count "Information" degrees as CS. My number doesn't include information degrees and yours does.
  - scott00 10y ago
    That's definitely an interesting difference. Do you think excluding Information degrees results in a more relevant number? If so, why?
    - fwadfka 10y ago
      People with CS degrees tend to be the ones building new software. Information degrees vary a lot, but tend to have decreased math requirements and be more focused on the application of technology. As a software engineer working in the bay area, I have seen hundreds of engineers with CS degrees and zero engineers with information degrees - in my experience there is a stark difference, and I would be surprised and interested if the data showed otherwise.
      - MollyR 10y ago
        Just to add an anecdote, Most of the companies I've worked for screen out non CS degree's except for exceptional portfolios. Not sure how wide spread this is.
getgoingnow 10y ago
Take a look at this [1]: *SAT-Mathematics White - 534 Black - 429 Asian - 598 Even if Blacks get CS/Engineering degrees, they can still be less competent than Asians/Whites. Tech companies attract the most talented people (e.g. Google gets millions of job applications per year) and they can pick those who are the most competent/best in class. Those are usually Asians and Whites. For example, if 10% of all CS degree holders are Black, you can't expect that there will be 10% of Blacks at tech companies. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171
- williamaadams 10y ago
  This is hilarious. SAT scores as indicator of competency, rather than merely a measure of how well someone takes a test.
  - getgoingnow 10y ago
    Yes, it's an indicator of competency in mathematics, which in turn makes a good computer scientist. What else would be a better indicator of math competency than math tests?
    - williamaadams 10y ago
      The hilarity is in how this perpetuates the reasons for excluding a class of individuals from participating in the software creation process. Good in math probably won't give you the empathy and insights into how technology could help rural Kentuckians. Additionally, software today is very much a 'poke at the frameworks, and mash it together' sort of affair. When I joined MS 17 years ago, knowing how to use WinDbg was probably a big skill to have. Today, it's more about knowing how to use various JavaScript frameworks. Math specifically comes into play perhaps when talking about data science specifically, but there's an app for that. If Math is a stand in for an ability to think critically, and apply the scientific method, then biologists, physicists, and even social scientists, might be just as qualified as any engineer. So, yah, one more exclusionary myth about the qualifications of engineers, and who's best at it (whites and Asians? really?).
jimmywanger 10y ago
One of the main problems I'm seeing these days is that a lot of companies think they can solve problems that start from childhood or culture. Most blacks that are recent African immigrants tend to do very well. http://www.atlnightspots.com/african-immigrants-have-the-highest-academic-achievement-in-the-us/ http://www.atlnightspots.com/african-immigrants-have-the-hig... That points to some aspect (not race) of African-Americans that cause them not to excel. Is it broken families or a culture of not "acting white"? (acting white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white) Those things needs to be dealt with on a community level, a band aid and a few initiatives by tech companies won't solve anything properly.
- exolymph 10y ago
  The effects of systemic racism should be considered as well.
  - kmicklas 10y ago
    Exactly, that is the root cause of these so called "community issues."
  - jimmywanger 10y ago
    What do you mean? Controlling for the fact that children of African immigrants do very well should eliminate systemic racism, as they have been exposed to that their whole life, and would be exposed to all the "systemic racism" their African-American cohort members would have been exposed to as well.
    - Jill_the_Pill 10y ago
      Not necessarily. It's possible, for example, that schools may have higher expectations and better supports for immigrant children. Immigrants may have economic or family educational advantages (they were the ones privileged enough to emigrate); they may reside in ethnic enclaves or white-majority neighborhoods that do not draw police suspicion and predatory economic practices; or, like the known hiring bias toward white-sounding names, human resources people may have an unconscious bias in favor of African-sounding names over recognizably African-American ones.
williamaadams 10y ago
I was one of the managers in Dare's team when he was hired at Microsoft. A very dynamic guy. Diversity hiring is challenging. Lots of pitfalls, minefields, and social cruft to get through. Here's my effort to improve things at Microsoft: http://www.industryexplorers.com http://www.industryexplorers.com You have to hit the whole pipeline, starting from k-12, and going all the way up through senior promotions. You have to think about which companies you do M&A work on, where you source in the world, and how you're going to engage with HBCUs and others. Most importantly, you have to take action, and not just talk and write about it. You have to change internal cultures. You have to recognize the biases and buzzwords such as "we don't want to lower the bar". You have to remind yourself that not too long ago, programming was something that very smart people, trained in many different things, engaged in as a side thing, not as a primary thing, and that's what's built our current industry. meh, it's a lot of work, and will take many more years of concerted effort.
selectron 10y ago
To really understand if companies are biased or not, you also need to know the percent of applicants to these companies who are black. If only 2% of applicants to Google are black, I would expect only 2% of new hires at Google to be black. The assumption that a white applicant and a black applicant should be roughly equal is a strong prior. I would need to see convincing data to counteract this assumption.
- jameshart 10y ago
  Absolutely, this is rather the point of the article: that diversity efforts focused on eliminating bias during selection are pointless unless you also ensure a diverse candidate pool to begin with.
whack 10y ago
I empathize with the author's frustration but there were many parts of the article which I found troubling: > "I also quickly learned that hiring managers for “good internships” don’t come to black colleges looking for interns regardless of how good the students are." I've never met anyone who didn't claim that their colleges is full of good students. There seems to be a heavy bias here - everyone has a rosy opinion of their own college, but clearly, companies can't go to every single one. If you feel that X college, whether it's a HBU, state-college, community-college, or code-camp, is great enough to be shortlisted over other alternatives, you really need to make a compelling case for this, using data. Just saying that Microsoft doesn't recruit from the college you used to attend, and therefore, they are being unfair/stupid, doesn't sound like a great argument. > In one of the most reasonably-priced major cities of America, a ten-minute walk from one of the world’s top ten engineering schools, Google has an office. There were once dozens of SWEs and SREs in this office, humming along, cranking out GWT, nerd shit etc. Google decided to close Atlanta engineering Again, this sounds exactly like the point above about colleges. There are ~30 major cities in America, and Google can't open significant dev-centers in every one of them. If you think that ATL would provide great value for Google along all axes (not just diversity), you need to make a compelling case for it. Just stating that Google doesn't have a major office in ATL, and therefore they are being unfair/stupid, isn't a great argument. > There were also the Hiring Committee meetings that became contentious when I advocated for diverse candidates. Candidates who were dinged for not being fast enough to solve problems, not having internships at ‘strong’ companies and who took too long to finish their degree. Only after hours of lobbying would they be hired. > when tech companies talk about “lowering the bar” by hiring minorities they are actually just saying they don’t want to hire minorities since no one in tech actually has a bar that works very well in determining good versus bad hires regardless of ethnicity or gender. This was the part I actually found most troubling. Google has an extremely high rejection rate - a large majority of their candidates end up getting rejected for "not being fast enough, not having strong internships" or for any number of other reasons. When the average Joe gets rejected for the above reasons, it's ok, but when a diversity candidate gets rejected for the same reasons, it's suddenly a problem? And what exactly is the author advocating when he talks about how interviews are useless, and therefore, there's no point in having a bar at all? It just sounds like the author is saying that there's no way of figuring out who's going to be a great candidate, and therefore, you might as well just set some minimum qualifications, and then hire anyone who meets those minimum qualifications and happens to be a diversity-candidate. It's arguments like this that make people think that diversity == lowering-the-bar. Yes, hiring is extremely hard, but no, that doesn't mean it can be skipped or watered down. Every successful company needs to figure out some heuristic that will allow them to hire only the best candidates, and any diversity push needs to be made while still respecting this stringent heuristic. If you think that Google's heuristic in unfairly biased against diversity candidates, in a way that's unrelated to job performance, you really need to provide evidence for this. Simply saying that Google rejected some diversity candidates because they didn't pass their evaluation-process, is a really weak argument. Overall, I agree with the author's thesis that the interviewing process is biased in many ways (race, gender, age, height, charisma, eloquence, etc etc), and that we need to do more to fix these problems. But the arguments he presents are so weak, and the insults he piles on MS/GOOG/FB are so unfair, that I find myself disagreeing with most of what he says.
dforrestwilson 10y ago
I'm sorry but I get bothered by the current national focus on rewarding or advantaging diversity based on arbitrary traits such as skin color and gender. I'm 5'8 and male. Height tends to correlate to success and salary. Should I receive special treatment because of my disadvantage? Perhaps a certain ratio of company board members should be required to be under a certain height threshold. I've also been bald since I was 18, a trait I have no control over, but which likely led to some lost opportunities (with the opposite sex at least). Do I deserve something special for that?

87 points by jameshart 10y ago

I don't know what to say

One critical point I feel this piece does not touch on is how diversity of experience is great in the workplace. It's a huge benefit as a developer (and obviously other professions too) to work on teams with people who have lived very different lives. The Mirrortocracy[0] covers this well, but it should be clear to us all that being exposed to different views helps refine our ideas and process. It's partly up to us to make diversity happen. We can prioritize offers that have diverse teams, and when we get a chance to hire to value diversity of experience. [0] http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html

Tunabrain 10y ago
I absolutely agree, though I always feel like culture and nationality are very underplayed in this discussion - I believe an American, an Eastern European and a Chinese national would bring a lot more diverse world views to the table than a female and a male American (or black and white).
th0waway 10y ago
as a counterpoint, take a group of singers - if they all sing their own song, chaos. Then, take of group of singers singing the same song in different keys: terrible music. Finally, take a group of singers singing the same song, in the same key: art. Diversity for the sake of diversity is no better than a group of people all singing their own song. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the only way to be great is to be diverse.
tzs 10y ago
> It's a huge benefit as a developer (and obviously other professions too) to work on teams with people who have lived very different lives. I can see how that would be true for some types of development, but there are also many type for which I don't see offhand how it would matter. For instance, if I were doing web design for my employer's shopping cart site I could see how having a diverse team could greatly help because the team would have people on it that are part of or identify with more of our customer demographics. I as a white male mid-50s atheist tall fat guy could easily inadvertently come up with a design that might turn off non-whites, females, young people or elderly people, religious people, short people, or skinny people. Even if I don't end up doing something to offend people, I could simply miss opportunities that people of other backgrounds might see. In fact, I've seen that kind of thing. I saw a company that was making CD-ROM caching software in the '90s find a nice cluster of sales when an employee who was also a Mormon pointed out that this software worked extremely well with the CD-ROM genealogy databases that were becoming quite popular among Mormons. Without that Mormon employee, they would have probably never noticed that Mormons could be a distinct market segment for this product that was worth specifically targeting. What I actually work on, though, is backend stuff like processing orders and subscription billing, interfacing to payment processors, reporting sales tax in the US and VAT in Europe, analyzing A/B tests, and so on. Would having a diverse team working on this actually produce any different results?

dlss 10y ago

It's quite surprising to me that Apple seems to be doing so much better at diversity hiring. I think Google, Facebook, and Twitter are quite serious with respect to diverse hiring / I find it hard to believe Apple's methods wouldn't be found out and copied by any of them if they worked so much better. Has anyone looked into the possibility that rather than Apple being uniquely good at diversity hiring, Apple is just uniquely good at gerrymandering their diversity report?

toyg 10y ago
Did we read the same post? The whole point is that they are not actually serious. There is a lot of lip service, but then diverse candidates in practice are stonewalled at every step: by location, by academic background, during evaluation etc. If they were serious, they could look beyond their institutionally-placed (and fairly arbitrary, let's say it) obstacles, like Apple did for his friend; but they won't, which means they are not serious.
- dlss 10y ago
  Right, that's the thesis of the article. The basis for concluding that Google, Facebook, etc were not "actually serious" was their numbers being lower than Apple's numbers. I was asking if perhaps OP's data analysis was flawed because (for example) Apple might be counting Genius Bar employees as "tech" for the purposes of the diversity report... ie maybe Apple has the same difficulty hiring diverse candidates as Google for similar positions, OP's friend's experience notwithstanding.
  - saranagati 10y ago
    on top of that, apple is much more of a device company than the others. this means that they will have a lot more people on the technical staff that aren't developers and those other positions may have a larger candidate pool of blacks.
- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  Yeah. Going further, another part of "being serious" is training and a demonstration of commitment to the employees after they're hired. Something like "Yes, this individual did not have a great education in youth because their local school district sucked. Nevertheless, this individual has potential. So we're committed to keeping this person on board and providing the necessary training. We will go to great lengths to make this person a useful and vital part of this company."

prostoalex 10y ago

Wouldn't "companies passing on highly qualified candidates due to a broken process" be a self-correcting problem, where other market players with non-broken hiring processes would be able to scoop the talent up and gain a competitive advantage?

Larrikin 10y ago
The author calls out Apple specifically and they are the most valuable company in the world.
- prostoalex 10y ago
  Right. So eventually companies following Apple's lead will be rewarded, while the companies following a contrarian route will either adjust or disappear.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    In the long run we're all dead.
  - vec 10y ago
    "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." - John Maynard Keynes Over the very long run, this _will_ self-correct. That fact is cold comfort to someone trying to get hired today.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  They are the most valuable publically-traded company in the world.
- beat 10y ago
  That's the whole point of the article, really... if Apple can manage 8% black representation, why can't Microsoft, Google, Twitter, or any of the other top-tier companies break 2%? It puts the lie to whatever excuses they make. Apple is clearly not "lowering the bar".
10y ago

adrianN 10y ago

Last I checked, the amount of black CS students in college is about the same as the as the amount of black software engineers.

rando289 10y ago
How do you check that? I've found reporting on race in tech to just be absolutely horrible with numbers. Whole stories where the only number is "Google repots X percent of Y race." It tells me absolutely nothing without comparing that to demographics of where google has offices, and what the demographics of cs students are, among other things, and I've never seen that info.
- beat 10y ago
  The article addresses that directly. The author talks about Google more or less abandoning its Atlanta office, where a diverse workforce is easier to get than elsewhere.
dareobasanjo 10y ago
I'm honestly confused by your response. Companies like Facebook, Twitter & Google hire 1% blacks in tech and 2% overall. Blacks as a percentage of college graduates in engineering or non-engineering fields are way more than 2% of graduating classes. However most Silicon Valley tech companies under-hire from this demographic for their own reasons.
- useful_intern 10y ago
  What is the percentage gtaduating from top universities? Then there's also the problem of university affirmative action which lowers the expected value of African Americans students compared to their peers
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Sacho 10y ago
  The numbers are confusing to me. Here's an article claiming that the amount of computer engineers is around 5% of all black college majors - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/report-few-black-college-students-major-in-high-paying-fields http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/report-few.... Now we need to make an implicit assumption that the enrollment and graduation rate of blacks is the same as the rate for the general population(I couldn't really find information on that, apologies). Using demographics data, blacks are ~15% of the overall population in the US. That means that about 0.75% of the total population are "blacks" && "engineer major". That would mean all the listed companies are overhiring black engineers if simply based on a college-graduate quota. Besides that, I liked the gist of your post, but the end seemed incredibly disingenuous. Correlating Apple's number of black engineers and its value does not imply causation, and that statement seemed like an emotional appeal.

feral 10y ago

To make a specific point, without prejudice to the main points of the blog post: >One of the open secrets of working in technology is that technical interviews are completely worthless as a predictor for whether someone is a good hire or not. [...] >> We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. > It’s amazing to think that Google found zero relationship between an interviewer saying “Hire” and whether the candidate was actually a good hire or not. The fact [the scores of someone who gets hired] are not predictive of their eventual performance, does not mean that hiring process is completely random, or worthless. In order to tell that, you would need to look at the cohort of people who were 'no hire' and compare them to the 'hire' cohort; it's not enough to just look within the 'hire' cohort. In other words, the hiring process is (1) designed to be a Classifier, typically tuned with an emphasis on having a low false positive rate. Hoping that (2) the scores of the small subset of candidates who are classed 'hire', also act well as a regression to the candidate's eventual performance, is a big additional ask. Just because there is evidence that (2) is untrue, or particularly noisy, does not necessarily mean that (1) is broken. I don't see a great way of solving this, without a large company like Google also randomly hiring 'no hires' from different stages in their hiring process (and subsequently measuring their performance) in order to quantify the performance of subsequent steps in the hiring process - not aware of anyone who has done that; it would be really interesting to read how a company who does that gets on, but an expensive experiment.

vonmoltke 10y ago
> The fact [the scores of someone who gets hired] are not predictive of their eventual performance, does not mean that hiring process is completely random, or worthless. It does not automatically mean this, but it is a strong indicator. If the output of the classifier is not correlated with a given output sample it is reasonable to assume, in the absence of other data, that it is uncorrelated for other samples as well.
- feral 10y ago
  I do accept it is evidence - but I don't think I would say a strong indicator, and it doesn't justify the strong conclusions made that the process is completely arbitrary. - It's imbalanced classification: there are going to be more rejections than acceptances; so you have less statistical power, to find if there is a real relationship, when you just analyse the acceptances. Even apart from that, class imbalance can unintuitively affect post-hoc inferences. - Scores are in context of the other candidates at a given level, and stage in the interview process, so are fundamentally already residual in some sense. - I'm willing to bet, from hiring I've seen, that scores are distributed somewhat about the 'hire/no-hire' bar, and that extremes are rare - the process is going to be tuned, implicitly in the organisation, to make that 'hire/no-hire' decision, rather than predict performance. > it is reasonable to assume, in the absence of other data, that it is uncorrelated for other samples as well I think that's a very strong statement: it's not a random sample, its explicitly concentrated at one end of the distribution. I do accept it is evidence, just not near enough to justify the conclusion the whole process is arbitrary.

fweespeech 10y ago

> This is where I’ll talk about the Big Lie from the title of my post. That lie is that there is some sort of pipeline problem preventing tech companies from hiring more black people. The reality is that tech companies shape the ethnic make up of their employees based on what schools & cities they choose to hire from and where they locate engineering offices. I agree this is a substantial part of the problem, particularly in larger corporations where they do target specific cities/schools. However, I'm not sure I can agree with the implication you should locate engineering offices based on the demographics as its the only way to fix the "cities where they locate their engineering offices". Demographic/diversity shouldn't be a criteria for office location. You shouldn't have to move your entire organization just because the city you happen to be in is ~5% Black and the largest minorities happen to be Asian or Hispanic. For instance at $Day_Job, the floor I'm on is 25% Asian, 5% Hispanic, 5% Black, 65% White. That is pretty much +/- 5% of the actual demographics. I wouldn't argue we lack diversity because we just follow the local demographics. I'd say the problem is when you are so out of whack with the local demographics it becomes absurd. For instance, an office in Atlanta that is 90% white.

rando289 10y ago
> Demographic/diversity shouldn't be a criteria for office location. Black cities are backwards and shitty and don't have CS grads, so no tech companies are HQed in black cities, but it's got nothing to do with race. I'm not racist: I'd have lots of black friends if they weren't all living in poor neighborhoods and jail where I don't go. We avoid logic and good data and good analysis of data when it comes to race, this post is at least getting a little closer.
- fweespeech 10y ago
  > Black cities are backwards and shitty and don't have CS grads, so no tech companies are HQed in black cities, but it's got nothing to do with race. I'm not racist: I'd have lots of black friends if they weren't all living in poor neighborhoods and jail where I don't go. We avoid logic and good data and good analysis of data when it comes to race, this post is at least getting a little closer. http://atlantatechvillage.com/membership/current-villagers/ http://atlantatechvillage.com/membership/current-villagers/ Eh? There are plenty of tech companies in cities with large numbers of African Americans. I'm just saying you shouldn't try to imply that 100% of Tech Companies should move to Atlanta (for instance) solely because there are a large number of black people there. You should be in Atlanta because it makes financial sense for the business you are operating. I said it shouldn't be a criteria used to determine location. For instance, if you are doing eCommerce with a large import/export component, you are probably going to want to be HQ'd near a major port and you probably won't want to relocate any further than you have to (if you have to relocate at all) as a founder. There are plenty of places on the West Coast where the largest minorities are Hispanic or Asian, they have easy access to factories in China & Mexico, and have small Black populations. That doesn't mean they should relocate to Atlanta where they don't have physical access to the locations their merchandise enters the US. The Bay Area is another area where this is an issue but it doesn't make sense to move (i.e. If you want access to Silicon Valley): http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm The area is less than 10% African American. You aren't going to have more than 5-10% African American employees unless you are biasing things intentionally. The largest minority? Latinos followed by Asians.

Alex3917 10y ago

While there is more than adequate evidence of racism in tech hiring, it would be useful if articles like this included the expected percentage of X engineers if there were no bias in the hiring process. E.g. if the expected percentage of black engineers if there were no bias in the hiring process was 2%, that seems like important information to include.

rando289 10y ago
I can't remember a story like this without horrible data: numbers without much context from which no good conclusions can be drawn.
woah 10y ago
Well the proportion of blacks in the US population is 13%, so even Apple should be hiring twice as many to have a proportional representation.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  But that's not the number to look at for an article like this. The whole idea of pipeline problems is that you lose proportionality a little at a time, from early education to full time careers. Ideally, you'd check the proportions starting from something like mathematical success or career intent in high school. Then you move on to college majors, graduation rates, and applicant pools. This is really important, because otherwise you end up focusing energy on non-leaky parts of the pipeline and achieving nothing. This article focuses on interviewing, but the segment on black colleges and office siting is crucial. Ensuring unbiased interviews doesn't stop you from drawing interview candidates from disproportionately white colleges. Holding local code-ins won't save you from having offices in overwhelmingly white cities. "Lowering the bar", which companies are (according to this) hugely concerned about, still wouldn't solve the problem. If you're studying the mismatch between 13% of the population and 1% of your workforce, the numbers you want are the ones that show where things went wrong.
- thesimpsons1022 10y ago
  I gaurantee you out of the people who can code or have cs degrees, blacks make up a much smaller percentage. You can't blame Apple for the deep societal issues we have that leads the average black person to be more likely to end up in prison than college

protomyth 10y ago

"I looked into it and it seems even after all these years the best way to get into Microsoft’s internship program is if your school is on the list of schools the company formally recruits from." This isn't unusual for technology companies. It isn't even unusual for research labs[1]. So, basically, the company has delegated its hiring diversity to a university admissions department. Worse, many universities only accept people into their graduate program from certain other universities. I've never heard of a recruiter from any of these golden schools visiting anywhere near me[4] Add to this ageism that is prevalent in technology and you have a the makings of lip service. Why is ageism problematic? Many minorities, particularly enrolled members of Native American tribes, go to school later than their white or Asian[2] counterparts. Many go into the military or need the extra time to sort themselves out. They typically go to a community college first (different path from average), then go to a university[3]. The school I went to was on Microsoft's list to hire only support people from. IBM didn't have that hangup and got one of the best developers I've ever known and it worked out fine for them. I would love to see these companies be a little wider with the hiring net, but I don't believe it will happen. They'll wring their hands and talk and release reports[5], but it won't change a thing because they don't get the basic problems. 1) in my youth I was refused for a summer internship because my high school and college were in the same area code.... 2) seems Asian isn't considered much except in the reverse of requirements - see the lawsuits against the California university system by Asian students 3) I'll leave the discussion on scholarships and students lying to get scholarships directed at certain minorities for a different time 4) hell, when I was applying in 1987, I had to travel to get the applications, pay the fees with money I really could have used, and never get a reply. Someone told me it was because, like everyone on the reservation I was from, I had used a post office box for my address. That seemed a bit far fetched to me. 5) I'll believe something might change when I see "enrolled tribal members" listed on their reports and a list of schools that includes ones that actually care about recruiting in diverse areas.

zerohp 10y ago
I don't know that ageism in technology necessarily means that older students are less likely to be hired out of university. I would be interested in seeing data to support that. As an anecdote, I have observed older students that attend the "right" school and achieve high grades are highly sought after by companies.

henrymercer 10y ago

"I used to attend Clark Atlanta University which was what is called a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) or colloquially “black college”. I picked up quite early on that getting good internships was key to landing a good job on graduation. I also quickly learned that hiring managers for “good internships” don’t come to black colleges looking for interns regardless of how good the students are. So I transferred to Georgia Tech, got that Microsoft internship 15 years ago and I’m still at the company today." Average SAT scores at Clark Atlanta University: 850 ( that is substantially below average, around 26th percentile) Average SAT scores at Virginia Tech: 1220 ( substantially above average, around 85th percentile) How many of the thousands of obscure colleges with better average SAT scores than Clark Atlanta does Microsoft recruit at? For example, does it recruit at some place like Oakland City University in Indiana (average SAT's ~950)? Seems to me like the tech companies are just recruiting where the most high smart/high SAT students are. One cannot infer racial bias from just looking at their failure to recruit at places like Clark Atlanta University. This might be unfortunate for the few high SAT smart kids at a college that is otherwise filled with mediocre students. But it would not be practical for Microsoft to recruit at every college. Conceivably, Microsoft or Google could give their own aptitude test directly, that would put applicants from any college or no college on the fast track for an interview -- but ironically, such a process would also be considered discriminatory -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

davidf18 10y ago

Companies should hire on the basis of merit, not skin color or sex. I did undergrad EE/CS at Illinois/Urbana and I don't recall any blacks in any of my classes at all. I've worked at high tech firms and never see black programmers/engineers. I've worked for a Wall Street bank and never saw black programmers/engineers. I've been to many tech Meetups and conferences and other conferences where software plays a major role but I've almost never seen black engineers/computer scientists. Some of the meetups / conferences I see few women, but I do see women in the aggregate, but almost never blacks and I'm in NYC where there are many blacks. I've been to Google Tech talks in the Google building in NYC yet never see blacks. Since the meetups don't require you go to "the right school" etc. and are free to attend it shows that there just are that many blacks that seem to be interested. Computer software and hardware are those areas where competence is extremely important. Hire on merit, not on other indicators.

thelock85 10y ago
So the lack of black participation in free tech events === lack of interest from black people? That's a stretch of a conclusion rife with confounding variables.
- davidf18 10y ago
  Yes, as an approximation. Could you please explain in plain english with examples exactly what you mean by that statement? NYC where I live has at least 1 million blacks. NYC has many hi tech firms NYC has many banks and financial institutions and media groups that all employ programmers and engineers. It has many tech Meetups. It has many opportunities to attend tech events that are free, and where there are no restrictions on attendance. So, please explain what you mean.
  - thelock85 10y ago
    Where I can agree is that there are basic opportunities (e.g. networking) in the tech community that Black Americans may not take interest in. The stretch comes when you equate that to having no interest at all in technology (correct me, if I've misconstrued your point there). What makes it a poor approximation IMHO is that you place assumptions around how to "make in tech". "Not participating == not interested" assumes that there is some universally accessible and well-known path to working in tech. Now, if you are saying that you've taken advantage of all of those events/opportunities (from your OP) because one day you magically became interested without implicit/explicit involvement from role models, loved ones, inspirational teachers, etc. then I will concede your point... but that would make you exceptional IMHO.

scott00 10y ago

Some statistics helpful to put the numbers in the article in context: * Percent of San Francisco MSA that is black: 7.9% * Percent of Atlanta MSA that is black: 32.8% * Percent of college graduates that are black: 10.0% * Percent of CS college graduates that are black: 11.5% * Percent of engineering graduates that are black: 4.45% Sources: http://www.directemployers.org/2012/08/16/the-college-class-of-2013-current-demographics/ http://www.directemployers.org/2012/08/16/the-college-class-... http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/12_1YR/CP05/310M100US12060|310M100US41860 http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/12_1YR/CP...

fwadfka 10y ago
> * Percent of CS college graduates that are black: 11.5% The number I got for 2015 was 2.5% (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12101868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12101868) One of the key sources of this difference is whether you count "Information" degrees as CS. My number doesn't include information degrees and yours does.
- scott00 10y ago
  That's definitely an interesting difference. Do you think excluding Information degrees results in a more relevant number? If so, why?
  - fwadfka 10y ago
    People with CS degrees tend to be the ones building new software. Information degrees vary a lot, but tend to have decreased math requirements and be more focused on the application of technology. As a software engineer working in the bay area, I have seen hundreds of engineers with CS degrees and zero engineers with information degrees - in my experience there is a stark difference, and I would be surprised and interested if the data showed otherwise.
    - MollyR 10y ago
      Just to add an anecdote, Most of the companies I've worked for screen out non CS degree's except for exceptional portfolios. Not sure how wide spread this is.

getgoingnow 10y ago

Take a look at this [1]: *SAT-Mathematics White - 534 Black - 429 Asian - 598 Even if Blacks get CS/Engineering degrees, they can still be less competent than Asians/Whites. Tech companies attract the most talented people (e.g. Google gets millions of job applications per year) and they can pick those who are the most competent/best in class. Those are usually Asians and Whites. For example, if 10% of all CS degree holders are Black, you can't expect that there will be 10% of Blacks at tech companies. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171

williamaadams 10y ago
This is hilarious. SAT scores as indicator of competency, rather than merely a measure of how well someone takes a test.
- getgoingnow 10y ago
  Yes, it's an indicator of competency in mathematics, which in turn makes a good computer scientist. What else would be a better indicator of math competency than math tests?
  - williamaadams 10y ago
    The hilarity is in how this perpetuates the reasons for excluding a class of individuals from participating in the software creation process. Good in math probably won't give you the empathy and insights into how technology could help rural Kentuckians. Additionally, software today is very much a 'poke at the frameworks, and mash it together' sort of affair. When I joined MS 17 years ago, knowing how to use WinDbg was probably a big skill to have. Today, it's more about knowing how to use various JavaScript frameworks. Math specifically comes into play perhaps when talking about data science specifically, but there's an app for that. If Math is a stand in for an ability to think critically, and apply the scientific method, then biologists, physicists, and even social scientists, might be just as qualified as any engineer. So, yah, one more exclusionary myth about the qualifications of engineers, and who's best at it (whites and Asians? really?).

jimmywanger 10y ago

One of the main problems I'm seeing these days is that a lot of companies think they can solve problems that start from childhood or culture. Most blacks that are recent African immigrants tend to do very well. http://www.atlnightspots.com/african-immigrants-have-the-highest-academic-achievement-in-the-us/ http://www.atlnightspots.com/african-immigrants-have-the-hig... That points to some aspect (not race) of African-Americans that cause them not to excel. Is it broken families or a culture of not "acting white"? (acting white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white) Those things needs to be dealt with on a community level, a band aid and a few initiatives by tech companies won't solve anything properly.

exolymph 10y ago
The effects of systemic racism should be considered as well.
- kmicklas 10y ago
  Exactly, that is the root cause of these so called "community issues."
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  What do you mean? Controlling for the fact that children of African immigrants do very well should eliminate systemic racism, as they have been exposed to that their whole life, and would be exposed to all the "systemic racism" their African-American cohort members would have been exposed to as well.
  - Jill_the_Pill 10y ago
    Not necessarily. It's possible, for example, that schools may have higher expectations and better supports for immigrant children. Immigrants may have economic or family educational advantages (they were the ones privileged enough to emigrate); they may reside in ethnic enclaves or white-majority neighborhoods that do not draw police suspicion and predatory economic practices; or, like the known hiring bias toward white-sounding names, human resources people may have an unconscious bias in favor of African-sounding names over recognizably African-American ones.

williamaadams 10y ago

I was one of the managers in Dare's team when he was hired at Microsoft. A very dynamic guy. Diversity hiring is challenging. Lots of pitfalls, minefields, and social cruft to get through. Here's my effort to improve things at Microsoft: http://www.industryexplorers.com http://www.industryexplorers.com You have to hit the whole pipeline, starting from k-12, and going all the way up through senior promotions. You have to think about which companies you do M&A work on, where you source in the world, and how you're going to engage with HBCUs and others. Most importantly, you have to take action, and not just talk and write about it. You have to change internal cultures. You have to recognize the biases and buzzwords such as "we don't want to lower the bar". You have to remind yourself that not too long ago, programming was something that very smart people, trained in many different things, engaged in as a side thing, not as a primary thing, and that's what's built our current industry. meh, it's a lot of work, and will take many more years of concerted effort.

selectron 10y ago

To really understand if companies are biased or not, you also need to know the percent of applicants to these companies who are black. If only 2% of applicants to Google are black, I would expect only 2% of new hires at Google to be black. The assumption that a white applicant and a black applicant should be roughly equal is a strong prior. I would need to see convincing data to counteract this assumption.

jameshart 10y ago
Absolutely, this is rather the point of the article: that diversity efforts focused on eliminating bias during selection are pointless unless you also ensure a diverse candidate pool to begin with.

whack 10y ago

I empathize with the author's frustration but there were many parts of the article which I found troubling: > "I also quickly learned that hiring managers for “good internships” don’t come to black colleges looking for interns regardless of how good the students are." I've never met anyone who didn't claim that their colleges is full of good students. There seems to be a heavy bias here - everyone has a rosy opinion of their own college, but clearly, companies can't go to every single one. If you feel that X college, whether it's a HBU, state-college, community-college, or code-camp, is great enough to be shortlisted over other alternatives, you really need to make a compelling case for this, using data. Just saying that Microsoft doesn't recruit from the college you used to attend, and therefore, they are being unfair/stupid, doesn't sound like a great argument. > In one of the most reasonably-priced major cities of America, a ten-minute walk from one of the world’s top ten engineering schools, Google has an office. There were once dozens of SWEs and SREs in this office, humming along, cranking out GWT, nerd shit etc. Google decided to close Atlanta engineering Again, this sounds exactly like the point above about colleges. There are ~30 major cities in America, and Google can't open significant dev-centers in every one of them. If you think that ATL would provide great value for Google along all axes (not just diversity), you need to make a compelling case for it. Just stating that Google doesn't have a major office in ATL, and therefore they are being unfair/stupid, isn't a great argument. > There were also the Hiring Committee meetings that became contentious when I advocated for diverse candidates. Candidates who were dinged for not being fast enough to solve problems, not having internships at ‘strong’ companies and who took too long to finish their degree. Only after hours of lobbying would they be hired. > when tech companies talk about “lowering the bar” by hiring minorities they are actually just saying they don’t want to hire minorities since no one in tech actually has a bar that works very well in determining good versus bad hires regardless of ethnicity or gender. This was the part I actually found most troubling. Google has an extremely high rejection rate - a large majority of their candidates end up getting rejected for "not being fast enough, not having strong internships" or for any number of other reasons. When the average Joe gets rejected for the above reasons, it's ok, but when a diversity candidate gets rejected for the same reasons, it's suddenly a problem? And what exactly is the author advocating when he talks about how interviews are useless, and therefore, there's no point in having a bar at all? It just sounds like the author is saying that there's no way of figuring out who's going to be a great candidate, and therefore, you might as well just set some minimum qualifications, and then hire anyone who meets those minimum qualifications and happens to be a diversity-candidate. It's arguments like this that make people think that diversity == lowering-the-bar. Yes, hiring is extremely hard, but no, that doesn't mean it can be skipped or watered down. Every successful company needs to figure out some heuristic that will allow them to hire only the best candidates, and any diversity push needs to be made while still respecting this stringent heuristic. If you think that Google's heuristic in unfairly biased against diversity candidates, in a way that's unrelated to job performance, you really need to provide evidence for this. Simply saying that Google rejected some diversity candidates because they didn't pass their evaluation-process, is a really weak argument. Overall, I agree with the author's thesis that the interviewing process is biased in many ways (race, gender, age, height, charisma, eloquence, etc etc), and that we need to do more to fix these problems. But the arguments he presents are so weak, and the insults he piles on MS/GOOG/FB are so unfair, that I find myself disagreeing with most of what he says.

dforrestwilson 10y ago

I'm sorry but I get bothered by the current national focus on rewarding or advantaging diversity based on arbitrary traits such as skin color and gender. I'm 5'8 and male. Height tends to correlate to success and salary. Should I receive special treatment because of my disadvantage? Perhaps a certain ratio of company board members should be required to be under a certain height threshold. I've also been bald since I was 18, a trait I have no control over, but which likely led to some lost opportunities (with the opposite sex at least). Do I deserve something special for that?