7 ms·

Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?

andrewstuart 9y ago
Because they interview them but they aren't a "cultural fit". Nothing is more important than protecting "the culture". https://medium.com/@bchesky/dont-fuck-up-the-culture-597cde9ee9d4 https://medium.com/@bchesky/dont-fuck-up-the-culture-597cde9... The article above says that "Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.", but in fact means "same as us: young white/indian/asian boys". "Culture" is a get out of jail free card that allows anyone to deny a job to anyone at all whilst sounding entirely credible and important. If you really want diversity then you would require reasons for rejecting any candidate, but you're not allowed to say "they weren't a cultural fit".
- friendly_chap 9y ago
  So what is the reason that white/indian/asian boys are preferred? Genuinely curious. I have mostly experience in London and there the landscape is extremely diverse. Why would any company not hire any ethnicity if they are good at what they do?
  - yters 9y ago
    I've wondered this. If there are so many talented underpaid people, isn't the right response to form a company that specifically hires from these groups? Should be a whole lot of money to be made.
    - zaptheimpaler 9y ago
      Hired.com Triplebyte Paysa HackerRank :)
    - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
      Second, why don't these people (apparently) band together? Where are the <underrepresented demographic> founders that hire people that are a cultural fit for them? I don't get why the blame is put on "silicon valley"; they don't have an obligation to provide work for everyone.
  - danso 9y ago
    Maybe whites/indians/asians aren't "preferred" in the sense of active racial discrimination. But the people currently at the company, being mostly of that ethnicity, may have personal contact lists/rolodecks that are weighted toward that ethnicity. I can attest to that as a Vietnamese-American myself. The vast majority of my childhood friends are white because I grew up in the Midwest. But I had far more Vietnamese friends than would be statistically expected because the few Vietnamese families in the community just hung out regularly even as they integrated with the rest of the town. If you grew up not just white, but upper-middle class and above, how many black people, statistically speaking, are you regularly in contact with? Versus someone who grows up lower-income or in the inner city? Being relatively well-off, you have a statistically better chance of getting a better K-12 education, which leads to a better chance at a top-tier school, and then to a top-tier company. You eventually are in a position to make recommendations for hires, and statistically speaking, you know more qualified whites than you do blacks and Hispanics. Statistically speaking, at many companies, recommendations from current employers carry a lot of weight. Over time, this statistical weighting of life experiences would lead to a mostly white/Asian workforce at a tech company. And no one in this process was ever thinking "No blacks". So to actually get a workforce that includes a representative number of a disenfranchised minority group, you actively have to seek it out. If you are in Silicon Valley, you have to actively make the decision to fly out to Howard U to do recruiting instead of the much more rational and cost-efficient decision to base recruiting at Stanford and Berkeley.
    - partycoder 9y ago
      +1. Very eloquently put. I would probably add that a portion of these are temporary work visa holders (e.g: H-1B). If you get terminated under these visas you are out of status and need to leave the country. Being on a temporary worker visa makes workers submissive and gives companies leverage over the employee.
    - averagewall 9y ago
      Strangely, hiring your friends is seen as corruption when it's for the government, but it's somehow the proper way to do things for the private sector. If companies really do exist to serve potential employees, then we should require them to do that fairly. However, if they're there to provide value for their customers, then maybe it doesn't matter who's friends they hire or what race they or how the discriminate. Nobody has a right to work at Google.
- vasco 9y ago
  My experience of "culture fit" is that it's actually used much more often for "can code well but is a jerk" than anything else. Anecdotal though.
  - ztjio 9y ago
    "Has overly passionate opinions based well outside fact and is an ass about it constantly. Also we share those opinions."
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    My field report on "culture fit" would be child of academic or fussy schoolteacher. There's a sort of pedantry in their communication that will take you further than your abilities in academia, yet really rubs everyone else the wrong way.
  - seppin 9y ago
    As a company, or sports team, or anything, you have every right to protect the existing group dynamic and to avoid distractions or negative influences.
  - andrewstuart 9y ago
    An Indian mother with young kids and a heavy accent.... is that "cultural fit" to a hip and young fast moving programming team of boys who like to do hackathons and have beers on friday night? Does your team employ any such people right now? I know for sure there's plenty of them applying for jobs....
- trabant00 9y ago
  How the hell could "same as us" mean "white/indian/asian boys"? I'm a white man from eastern Europe and the white americans I work with are anything but the same culture as mine. Indians could well be from another planet. Interestingly enough (though only anecdotal) black US workers have a more similar way of thinking to mine than white US ones. There's huge diversity in IT, you're just too blinded by your ideology to see it. You are the problem with your black/white quotas. You think there's diversity/differences inborn in the skin color. And that kind of thinking is called racism.
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  If you ever worked for a truly great company, with tons of inspirational people, then you know the culture stuff is real. Very real. Once company loses it, most of the best talent will simply walk away, because there is only so much motivation you can get with money (and competition doesn't usually pay really much less anyway). Never worked in US, so hardly understanding the pathological obsession with political correctness there. I once experienced this great environment, and even though I am now paid maybe 4x as much, this was by far, far, far the best working experience I ever had. The relationships from this period are still alive across whole (former) staff even after the company was bought 8 years ago by international corp and lost much of its mojo (and within few months tons of those great people left for jobs that weren't paid more). As for the topic discussed, yeah just hire the best fit for hard and soft skills whatever the background, color of skin or native language. This is true equality, in mind and in action. Anybody expecting that spread across races/skin color/religion/whatever will be 100% matching that of general population is dangerously naive though
- retox 9y ago
  The culture is young, single, not going to rock the boat. Why do they trendy SV companies have everything on site? So you don't leave them site. Parents do.
- scythe 9y ago
  You're implying that "culture" so defined doesn't actually affect the work process. But what if it does? What if exclusive, unfair selection of employees actually induces them to work harder or more efficiently? I don't believe this[1], and if it were true, it wouldn't make the situation much better. But the alternate hypothesis is that all of these companies are leaving money on the table. These companies like to play on the idea that people should enjoy their jobs, which is obviously ridiculous because it's work, but if you can fool people into believing it, you can get them to work overtime and you profit. If letting your employees be casually racist means you get 15% more work out of them at the cost of 15% of your hiring pool it's a win because you save on labor costs. A necessary presupposition of the exercise is that the employees can be swayed by appeals to tribal psychology -- support the team (company) -- which is also the basis of racism. It sounds stupid when I say "letting your employees be casually racist" but if I substitute "only hire League of Legends players" it's obvious what's going on. It just so happens that the culture associated with many forms of entertainment techies enjoy is toxic to minorities and tends to be less black/Latino and more white/Asian than America as a whole. And all these things are tied together in the patchwork of culture. The utility of this sort of cultural Tom Sawyering extends beyond tech; it's crucial to the armed forces, for example, but appealing to minorities had more upsides for the financial backers in that case, and the military has more control over the culture it instills in soldiers, whereas Google et al ride the wave of contemporary US nerd affectations. [1] - okay, why not? There may be some culturally homogenous workplaces but it's not the norm in my experience. The lack of black people at tech companies probably is also related to the fact that they're in cities with fewer black people and depend heavily on referrals for hiring. But referrals depend on friendships which goes back to that culture of entertainment for nerds I was talking about.
jsf666 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
staticelf 9y ago
The US is crazy about race as always. Just hire the most qualified person for the job.
- Moru 9y ago
  Or the cheapest, whatever comes first.
  - retox 9y ago
    The cheapest is the least qualified.
- wyclif 9y ago
  You make it sound as if every other Western country with a tech footprint doesn't do the same thing. They do.
  - retrac98 9y ago
    Not to the same extent.
    - wyclif 9y ago
      Sounds like a classic form of selection bias to me. Most high tech companies are in the US.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    You make it sound as they do. Tried a few other western countries?
    - wyclif 9y ago
      So does the UK, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Australia, NZ, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, and every other Western, white-dominant tech host country.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
This kind of made me throw up in my mouth a little. It's like every smart kid who knows something about computers is chomping at the bit to become a mercenary-in-training for soulless megacorps, and their keepers are every bit as gung-ho on making that happen. Instead of making overtures to Google and Facebook, they should be making the next big thing that kicks them square in the nuts. If anyone from Howard University is reading this, get started on it. I believe in you.
ghostcluster 9y ago
> The slow progress reflects the knottiness of one of Silicon Valley’s most persistent problems: It’s too white. That's not true. Whites are underrepresented at Silicon Valley companies compared to their share of the US population. Asians are massively, massively over represented. Why? There is no way to answer the question without opening the can of worms that is test scores, IQ, etc. So instead of being honest, the story paints a politically convenient narrative that is not actually true.
- ztjio 9y ago
  Why wouldn't you acquire indentured servants on the cheap from countries with even more draconian work ethics than the US?
  - Banthum 9y ago
    Fair enough, but why wouldn't you acquire them from Africa?
    - emj 9y ago
      I don't know about work, but getting travel visa for people with African citizenships for attending conferences can be really hard. This could probably be solved if companies wanted to.
      - xyzzyz 9y ago
        A path to immigration and citizenship for citizens of African countries is only easier than for those of Indian or Chinese origin -- much shorter EB-2/EB-3 waiting times, higher chance of winning the DV lottery, etc.
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    Have you been paying attention to what SV leaders think about H1B visas?
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
margorczynski 9y ago
Probably gonna get eaten alive here but the easiest explanation (Ockham's Razor) are differences in IQ distributions. The article propagates this "white supremacy" narrative when in fact Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are vastly overrepresented taking into account the relative population numbers The average sub-saharan IQ is around 70, the SD 15. If I remember correctly an average coder is something like 110-115 IQ. That is about 3xSD above the average for African blacks which means that about only 0.3% of them are fit for this kind of job.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Lies, damn lies, and statistics. African Americans have had western cultural innovation on lock-down for at least the past 100 years, and IQ was cooked-up by by a field of "science" that can't even reproduce its own seminal papers.
  - margorczynski 9y ago
    > Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Not an argument > African Americans have had western cultural innovation on lock-down for at least the past 100 years African Americans (which are mulatto btw) constitute to a very small percentage of blacks in the world. And while the importance can discussed all those cultural innovations were built upon western (white) accomplishments. There is almost none signifact scientific/cultural innovations that came form Africa. > and IQ was cooked-up by by a field of "science" that can't even reproduce its own seminal papers IQ study is the most well-researched and studied branch of Psychometry and usual attemps at "disproval" are centered around bogus arguments around enviroment being the dominant factor (where study finds that 50%-80% of it is genetic)
    - jstewartmobile 9y ago
      >> Not an argument Totally an argument when "statistics" frequently just means, "I put my small sample size of confounded variables in Excel and ran the stat functions." >> There is almost none signifact scientific/cultural innovations that came form Africa. You mean people living in undeveloped countries aren't going to be on the forefront of cultural innovation? I'm shocked. >> IQ study is the most well-researched and studied branch of Psychometry and usual attemps at "disproval" are centered around bogus arguments around enviroment being the dominant factor (where study finds that 50%-80% of it is genetic) Never even addressed nature vs nurture. I'm sure if any other bunch of quacks spent a hundred years tweaking a test to predict their idea of intelligence, I'm sure it would. I'd be less sure about it predicting the forms of intellect they failed to consider.
echan00 9y ago
Tonnes of kids from great CS programs apply to jobs at Google/Facebook/Pinterest/etc, the reality is that it is difficult to secure a job at these companies straight out of college. Call me ignorant, but I don't think race is the reason why black coders aren't given a chance at these companies. All these companies are looking to "diversify" their workforce (they even have teams focused on this issue!), they are just having trouble finding quality talent within non-represented groups.
cup-of-tea 9y ago
I think there is a good reason. I'm not going to say what it is, but it's wrong to hold white people accountable for it.
expertentipp 9y ago
It’s essential to take such articles with grain of salt, because the „empowering black people” problem exists mostly in US/UK. It’s surreal to work in low cost center of American company somewhere in developing contry being paid and treated like shit, then one opens the company’s intranet and sees articles like „we empower black Americans!”. I couldn’t care less. There are awful culture problems in the industry, yes, but they have very litte to do with hiring or not hiring black Americans.
grabcocque 9y ago
What if, and I’m going to go out on a limb here, it’s because Silicon Valley is run by white, racist misogynists? Would it be that much of a shock, given pretty much every American industry is run by the same people?
lvoudour 9y ago
That fall, when Facebook’s Williams came to campus with colleagues, the visit didn’t go over well. In a meeting with students, one Facebook employee brought up diversity so often that students say they felt uncomfortable—as if she wanted to talk only about the color of their skin and not programming. The event had been advertised as focused on diversity, but students had been eager to talk about jobs Is it so damn hard to understand that selecting skilled people based on their physiology rather than their abilities, is extremely offensive and demeaning? Yes there are many who will say nothing and take the job (a salary is a salary after all) but I don't know if there's a skilled person out there who wouldn't feel disrespected
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Is it so damn hard to understand that selecting skilled people based on their physiology rather than their abilities, is extremely offensive and demeaning? It's the BS idea that you can fix a root-level problem downstream. Blacks face systematic oppression, poorly funded school districts, median poor households partly resulting from a century of segregation, redlining, less options, legal bias, etc? Fuck that, just force companies to hire more of them. Problem fixed /s
- mbaha 9y ago
  Seeing comments like yours today on this Bloomberg piece is quite reassuring. I technically count as a "minority" and I have no other way of phrasing this: it is extremely irritating to see companies push for diversity by hiring based on skin colour or gender. Luckily, I live in a country that strongly opposes these kinds of policies, so I get to feel proud of my (very modest) achievements in this field. To see these students and other minorities never being able to experience that feeling makes me quite sad.
gotofritz 9y ago
Because there aren't as many, sadly, and many convince themselves SV is not for them, or they have no chance
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  I don't think anyone fresh out of college could afford to live there, not even in a shared house. When are the big SV companies doing what's right and creating new offices in other cities where there's talented developers that can't afford to move to / live in SV and/or its shit conditions?
  - minhazm 9y ago
    Everyone I know who got a job out of college in SV/SF got at least a 100k total comp package (usually more). Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and all of the bigger companies offer ~150k total comp or more to new grads. That said, some start-ups definitely do pay less, but it's not so bad that you can't at least get a room mate.
wyclif 9y ago
The same reason they don't like hiring women coders and coders over 30 (because of ageism). They use "culture fit" to shield them from diversity. I hate to be cynical, though. It's just that I know too much about how tech companies operate. There's no doubt in my mind that there are more black coders working now than there were when I got into this industry, and that's a good thing. They just don't have much visibility now, but I think that too will change. Baby steps...
- danso 9y ago
  If it makes you feel better, most companies in every industry have similar biases.
  - expertentipp 9y ago
    so those culturally unfit, once on the other side, where do they go?
    - danso 9y ago
      Where do job applicants who don't get hired normally go?
csa 9y ago
> "Silicon Valley is rife with Stanford and MIT graduates who started coding during childhood, won programming competitions in their spare time, and spent their summers interning at startups. At Howard, few of Pratt’s students fit that profile." > "None had programmed before college." I think these two quotes answer the headline question. Specifically, give one group of people a 4+ year head start in the field in addition to engaging in activities that will build confidence for the person when engaging in those activities (e.g., participating in and/or winning programming competitions in high school), is it really a surprise that the less-experienced group is grossly underrepresented in hiring? To make the above comparison not about race, how well are low-SES white people represented in Silicon Valley? Probably at equally low proportion for similar reasons -- they just don't have the same amount of experience as the highly competitive applicants. What's the solution? Reach out to underrepresented populations and get them started on programming much earlier. It's expensive and time consuming, but it's totally doable.
- lvoudour 9y ago
  Specifically, give one group of people a 4+ year head start in the field in addition to engaging in activities that will build confidence for the person when engaging in those activities (e.g., participating in and/or winning programming competitions in high school), is it really a surprise that the less-experienced group is grossly underrepresented in hiring? I think the assumption that to qualify for employment in SV you need to hack full products in your garage, participate in coding/science school competitions and have a MIT/Stanford degree, doesn't hold under scrutiny
  - csa 9y ago
    Agreed. It wasn't my comment -- just a summary of the article. I almost wrote a parenthetical in my original reply to the effect that I doubted the ubiquitousness of the first quote. That said, I do think that the prior experience is a real issue. Rather than "winning programming competitions"or "hacking full projects in your garage", I do think it's safe to say that the vast majority of the folks who are competitive applicants to AppAmaGooFaceSoft started programming and were exposed directly or indirectly to CS ideas before they entered college. This may have been as simple as making a website for a school club (although frankly it was probably quite a bit more than that), but even actions as small as making a website open the door to a new world -- it is the beginning of the process of exploring new ideas and new problem spaces.
buro9 9y ago
The answer to all of these questions are the same uncomfortable truths that people don't wish to admit: * Classism * Racism * Sexism * <other>-ism The problems for the under-represented isn't just the end of the tunnel where people are quick to claim "But <insert minority> is not applying!"... it's the entire tunnel. It's really hard to be a <insert non-cis white male> in tech. Because at every step there is an obstacle. Those obstacles may be in your face (racism when you move to an area that is predominantly something else), or subtle things like you not being able to afford to live in SF because your minority doesn't have the implicit network strength of being the average white male and it's hard for you to find a place to live. The average developer that you may have seen from a minority background has already overcome more obstacles than their peers. But importantly, the vast majority never made it so far. The obstacles reduced their numbers long before. I look around at those who have made it, and the majority are white males from stable middle-class backgrounds. This stability and security, this confidence that a supportive family gives, this safety that a low-crime area brings, access to materials and space in which to learn, this reinforcement at every step that you are surrounded by "people like you" and that you deserve to be there... is such a huge thing that is taken for granted. If you're a white male in tech, consider whether you could have made it to where you are without all of that. Of course there are lots of individual exceptions (I spent 2.5 years sleeping rough and come from a background of poverty and abuse)... but by and large, this is your privilege and it is also why the numbers for <minority> aren't there. For those that do make it... support them and help them. They've had it hard and deserve not just what they've achieved but more too.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  > I look around at those who have made it, and the majority are white males from stable middle-class backgrounds. This stability and security, this confidence that a supportive family gives, this safety that a low-crime area brings, access to materials and space in which to learn, this reinforcement at every step that you are surrounded by "people like you" and that you deserve to be there... is such a huge thing that is taken for granted. You imply that white people are privileged because they're white, yet look at this sentence. It seems to me like poor white people _don't_ go into tech. Couldn't socioeconomic/cultural differences explain the discrepancies and not systemic racism/sexism/-ism? Just because statistically more white people grow up middle class does _not_ mean that all white people are privileged. Acting like they are is discriminatory.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
focaldev98 9y ago
I'm black myself(although just African not American). Science and technology are my ethos. With that out of the way, I think that a major contributor is the prejudice and stereotypes deriving from both the black & white communities.
stormbeard 9y ago
I'd be curious to see how the proportion of students hired into Google or FB from Howard compares to a normal school (not Stanford or MIT) with a CS program. Out of 30 students in the senior class, only 1 or 2 were hired on full time, which comes to be about 3-6%. I'm more concerned about whether the other 95% of students are finding technology-related jobs at all. If not, that would be a bigger problem in my opinion.
johngrefe 9y ago
I've thought about this a lot. If we're going after the most affected, it's going to be inner city youths. They have a lesser chance of making it through a 4 year, because their support structure isn't there because of historical injustices. K-12's can change their curriculum to focus more on tech for a specific type of application, instead of just "build an app, write node, learn python" generics. Especially if they can turn out talented students before HS graduation. >Microcontrollers >Auto Engine Management Systems >Civil Infrastructure >Utility Infrastructure I know these are by and large not the 'sexy' pie in the sky stuff most 'hot' investors chase, but these are upper-middle class jobs that there is less competition in, and are actually vitally important, meaning they will be around longer than SNAP inc. I think with intensive focus, the people who are placed in these programs, their kids will be completing CS 4 years and competing for 'creative applications in the valley', but the foundations need to be built up first.
legendiriz68 9y ago
Someone has to say this anyway: asians have highest average IQ, blacks lowest and whites are between them. Companies want smart people.
nova22033 9y ago
>Silicon Valley is rife with Stanford and MIT graduates who started coding during childhood, won programming competitions in their spare time They've identified the problem.. Maybe fund a program to teach programming to economically disadvantaged kids? in 10 years, those kids will be on a little more level playing field.
shidoshi 9y ago
This article was originally published in 2016, and HN had a lot to say then as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10944966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10944966

Because they interview them but they aren't a "cultural fit". Nothing is more important than protecting "the culture". https://medium.com/@bchesky/dont-fuck-up-the-culture-597cde9ee9d4 https://medium.com/@bchesky/dont-fuck-up-the-culture-597cde9... The article above says that "Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.", but in fact means "same as us: young white/indian/asian boys". "Culture" is a get out of jail free card that allows anyone to deny a job to anyone at all whilst sounding entirely credible and important. If you really want diversity then you would require reasons for rejecting any candidate, but you're not allowed to say "they weren't a cultural fit".

friendly_chap 9y ago
So what is the reason that white/indian/asian boys are preferred? Genuinely curious. I have mostly experience in London and there the landscape is extremely diverse. Why would any company not hire any ethnicity if they are good at what they do?
- yters 9y ago
  I've wondered this. If there are so many talented underpaid people, isn't the right response to form a company that specifically hires from these groups? Should be a whole lot of money to be made.
  - zaptheimpaler 9y ago
    Hired.com Triplebyte Paysa HackerRank :)
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    Second, why don't these people (apparently) band together? Where are the <underrepresented demographic> founders that hire people that are a cultural fit for them? I don't get why the blame is put on "silicon valley"; they don't have an obligation to provide work for everyone.
- danso 9y ago
  Maybe whites/indians/asians aren't "preferred" in the sense of active racial discrimination. But the people currently at the company, being mostly of that ethnicity, may have personal contact lists/rolodecks that are weighted toward that ethnicity. I can attest to that as a Vietnamese-American myself. The vast majority of my childhood friends are white because I grew up in the Midwest. But I had far more Vietnamese friends than would be statistically expected because the few Vietnamese families in the community just hung out regularly even as they integrated with the rest of the town. If you grew up not just white, but upper-middle class and above, how many black people, statistically speaking, are you regularly in contact with? Versus someone who grows up lower-income or in the inner city? Being relatively well-off, you have a statistically better chance of getting a better K-12 education, which leads to a better chance at a top-tier school, and then to a top-tier company. You eventually are in a position to make recommendations for hires, and statistically speaking, you know more qualified whites than you do blacks and Hispanics. Statistically speaking, at many companies, recommendations from current employers carry a lot of weight. Over time, this statistical weighting of life experiences would lead to a mostly white/Asian workforce at a tech company. And no one in this process was ever thinking "No blacks". So to actually get a workforce that includes a representative number of a disenfranchised minority group, you actively have to seek it out. If you are in Silicon Valley, you have to actively make the decision to fly out to Howard U to do recruiting instead of the much more rational and cost-efficient decision to base recruiting at Stanford and Berkeley.
  - partycoder 9y ago
    +1. Very eloquently put. I would probably add that a portion of these are temporary work visa holders (e.g: H-1B). If you get terminated under these visas you are out of status and need to leave the country. Being on a temporary worker visa makes workers submissive and gives companies leverage over the employee.
  - averagewall 9y ago
    Strangely, hiring your friends is seen as corruption when it's for the government, but it's somehow the proper way to do things for the private sector. If companies really do exist to serve potential employees, then we should require them to do that fairly. However, if they're there to provide value for their customers, then maybe it doesn't matter who's friends they hire or what race they or how the discriminate. Nobody has a right to work at Google.
vasco 9y ago
My experience of "culture fit" is that it's actually used much more often for "can code well but is a jerk" than anything else. Anecdotal though.
- ztjio 9y ago
  "Has overly passionate opinions based well outside fact and is an ass about it constantly. Also we share those opinions."
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  My field report on "culture fit" would be child of academic or fussy schoolteacher. There's a sort of pedantry in their communication that will take you further than your abilities in academia, yet really rubs everyone else the wrong way.
- seppin 9y ago
  As a company, or sports team, or anything, you have every right to protect the existing group dynamic and to avoid distractions or negative influences.
- andrewstuart 9y ago
  An Indian mother with young kids and a heavy accent.... is that "cultural fit" to a hip and young fast moving programming team of boys who like to do hackathons and have beers on friday night? Does your team employ any such people right now? I know for sure there's plenty of them applying for jobs....
trabant00 9y ago
How the hell could "same as us" mean "white/indian/asian boys"? I'm a white man from eastern Europe and the white americans I work with are anything but the same culture as mine. Indians could well be from another planet. Interestingly enough (though only anecdotal) black US workers have a more similar way of thinking to mine than white US ones. There's huge diversity in IT, you're just too blinded by your ideology to see it. You are the problem with your black/white quotas. You think there's diversity/differences inborn in the skin color. And that kind of thinking is called racism.
saiya-jin 9y ago
If you ever worked for a truly great company, with tons of inspirational people, then you know the culture stuff is real. Very real. Once company loses it, most of the best talent will simply walk away, because there is only so much motivation you can get with money (and competition doesn't usually pay really much less anyway). Never worked in US, so hardly understanding the pathological obsession with political correctness there. I once experienced this great environment, and even though I am now paid maybe 4x as much, this was by far, far, far the best working experience I ever had. The relationships from this period are still alive across whole (former) staff even after the company was bought 8 years ago by international corp and lost much of its mojo (and within few months tons of those great people left for jobs that weren't paid more). As for the topic discussed, yeah just hire the best fit for hard and soft skills whatever the background, color of skin or native language. This is true equality, in mind and in action. Anybody expecting that spread across races/skin color/religion/whatever will be 100% matching that of general population is dangerously naive though
retox 9y ago
The culture is young, single, not going to rock the boat. Why do they trendy SV companies have everything on site? So you don't leave them site. Parents do.
scythe 9y ago
You're implying that "culture" so defined doesn't actually affect the work process. But what if it does? What if exclusive, unfair selection of employees actually induces them to work harder or more efficiently? I don't believe this[1], and if it were true, it wouldn't make the situation much better. But the alternate hypothesis is that all of these companies are leaving money on the table. These companies like to play on the idea that people should enjoy their jobs, which is obviously ridiculous because it's work, but if you can fool people into believing it, you can get them to work overtime and you profit. If letting your employees be casually racist means you get 15% more work out of them at the cost of 15% of your hiring pool it's a win because you save on labor costs. A necessary presupposition of the exercise is that the employees can be swayed by appeals to tribal psychology -- support the team (company) -- which is also the basis of racism. It sounds stupid when I say "letting your employees be casually racist" but if I substitute "only hire League of Legends players" it's obvious what's going on. It just so happens that the culture associated with many forms of entertainment techies enjoy is toxic to minorities and tends to be less black/Latino and more white/Asian than America as a whole. And all these things are tied together in the patchwork of culture. The utility of this sort of cultural Tom Sawyering extends beyond tech; it's crucial to the armed forces, for example, but appealing to minorities had more upsides for the financial backers in that case, and the military has more control over the culture it instills in soldiers, whereas Google et al ride the wave of contemporary US nerd affectations. [1] - okay, why not? There may be some culturally homogenous workplaces but it's not the norm in my experience. The lack of black people at tech companies probably is also related to the fact that they're in cities with fewer black people and depend heavily on referrals for hiring. But referrals depend on friendships which goes back to that culture of entertainment for nerds I was talking about.

jsf666 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

staticelf 9y ago

The US is crazy about race as always. Just hire the most qualified person for the job.

Moru 9y ago
Or the cheapest, whatever comes first.
- retox 9y ago
  The cheapest is the least qualified.
wyclif 9y ago
You make it sound as if every other Western country with a tech footprint doesn't do the same thing. They do.
- retrac98 9y ago
  Not to the same extent.
  - wyclif 9y ago
    Sounds like a classic form of selection bias to me. Most high tech companies are in the US.
- coldtea 9y ago
  You make it sound as they do. Tried a few other western countries?
  - wyclif 9y ago
    So does the UK, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Australia, NZ, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, and every other Western, white-dominant tech host country.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

This kind of made me throw up in my mouth a little. It's like every smart kid who knows something about computers is chomping at the bit to become a mercenary-in-training for soulless megacorps, and their keepers are every bit as gung-ho on making that happen. Instead of making overtures to Google and Facebook, they should be making the next big thing that kicks them square in the nuts. If anyone from Howard University is reading this, get started on it. I believe in you.

ghostcluster 9y ago

> The slow progress reflects the knottiness of one of Silicon Valley’s most persistent problems: It’s too white. That's not true. Whites are underrepresented at Silicon Valley companies compared to their share of the US population. Asians are massively, massively over represented. Why? There is no way to answer the question without opening the can of worms that is test scores, IQ, etc. So instead of being honest, the story paints a politically convenient narrative that is not actually true.

ztjio 9y ago
Why wouldn't you acquire indentured servants on the cheap from countries with even more draconian work ethics than the US?
- Banthum 9y ago
  Fair enough, but why wouldn't you acquire them from Africa?
  - emj 9y ago
    I don't know about work, but getting travel visa for people with African citizenships for attending conferences can be really hard. This could probably be solved if companies wanted to.
    - xyzzyz 9y ago
      A path to immigration and citizenship for citizens of African countries is only easier than for those of Indian or Chinese origin -- much shorter EB-2/EB-3 waiting times, higher chance of winning the DV lottery, etc.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  Have you been paying attention to what SV leaders think about H1B visas?
ZeroGravitas 9y ago

margorczynski 9y ago

Probably gonna get eaten alive here but the easiest explanation (Ockham's Razor) are differences in IQ distributions. The article propagates this "white supremacy" narrative when in fact Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are vastly overrepresented taking into account the relative population numbers The average sub-saharan IQ is around 70, the SD 15. If I remember correctly an average coder is something like 110-115 IQ. That is about 3xSD above the average for African blacks which means that about only 0.3% of them are fit for this kind of job.

jstewartmobile 9y ago
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. African Americans have had western cultural innovation on lock-down for at least the past 100 years, and IQ was cooked-up by by a field of "science" that can't even reproduce its own seminal papers.
- margorczynski 9y ago
  > Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Not an argument > African Americans have had western cultural innovation on lock-down for at least the past 100 years African Americans (which are mulatto btw) constitute to a very small percentage of blacks in the world. And while the importance can discussed all those cultural innovations were built upon western (white) accomplishments. There is almost none signifact scientific/cultural innovations that came form Africa. > and IQ was cooked-up by by a field of "science" that can't even reproduce its own seminal papers IQ study is the most well-researched and studied branch of Psychometry and usual attemps at "disproval" are centered around bogus arguments around enviroment being the dominant factor (where study finds that 50%-80% of it is genetic)
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    >> Not an argument Totally an argument when "statistics" frequently just means, "I put my small sample size of confounded variables in Excel and ran the stat functions." >> There is almost none signifact scientific/cultural innovations that came form Africa. You mean people living in undeveloped countries aren't going to be on the forefront of cultural innovation? I'm shocked. >> IQ study is the most well-researched and studied branch of Psychometry and usual attemps at "disproval" are centered around bogus arguments around enviroment being the dominant factor (where study finds that 50%-80% of it is genetic) Never even addressed nature vs nurture. I'm sure if any other bunch of quacks spent a hundred years tweaking a test to predict their idea of intelligence, I'm sure it would. I'd be less sure about it predicting the forms of intellect they failed to consider.

echan00 9y ago

Tonnes of kids from great CS programs apply to jobs at Google/Facebook/Pinterest/etc, the reality is that it is difficult to secure a job at these companies straight out of college. Call me ignorant, but I don't think race is the reason why black coders aren't given a chance at these companies. All these companies are looking to "diversify" their workforce (they even have teams focused on this issue!), they are just having trouble finding quality talent within non-represented groups.

cup-of-tea 9y ago

I think there is a good reason. I'm not going to say what it is, but it's wrong to hold white people accountable for it.

expertentipp 9y ago

It’s essential to take such articles with grain of salt, because the „empowering black people” problem exists mostly in US/UK. It’s surreal to work in low cost center of American company somewhere in developing contry being paid and treated like shit, then one opens the company’s intranet and sees articles like „we empower black Americans!”. I couldn’t care less. There are awful culture problems in the industry, yes, but they have very litte to do with hiring or not hiring black Americans.

grabcocque 9y ago

What if, and I’m going to go out on a limb here, it’s because Silicon Valley is run by white, racist misogynists? Would it be that much of a shock, given pretty much every American industry is run by the same people?

lvoudour 9y ago

That fall, when Facebook’s Williams came to campus with colleagues, the visit didn’t go over well. In a meeting with students, one Facebook employee brought up diversity so often that students say they felt uncomfortable—as if she wanted to talk only about the color of their skin and not programming. The event had been advertised as focused on diversity, but students had been eager to talk about jobs Is it so damn hard to understand that selecting skilled people based on their physiology rather than their abilities, is extremely offensive and demeaning? Yes there are many who will say nothing and take the job (a salary is a salary after all) but I don't know if there's a skilled person out there who wouldn't feel disrespected

coldtea 9y ago
>Is it so damn hard to understand that selecting skilled people based on their physiology rather than their abilities, is extremely offensive and demeaning? It's the BS idea that you can fix a root-level problem downstream. Blacks face systematic oppression, poorly funded school districts, median poor households partly resulting from a century of segregation, redlining, less options, legal bias, etc? Fuck that, just force companies to hire more of them. Problem fixed /s
mbaha 9y ago
Seeing comments like yours today on this Bloomberg piece is quite reassuring. I technically count as a "minority" and I have no other way of phrasing this: it is extremely irritating to see companies push for diversity by hiring based on skin colour or gender. Luckily, I live in a country that strongly opposes these kinds of policies, so I get to feel proud of my (very modest) achievements in this field. To see these students and other minorities never being able to experience that feeling makes me quite sad.

gotofritz 9y ago

Because there aren't as many, sadly, and many convince themselves SV is not for them, or they have no chance

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
I don't think anyone fresh out of college could afford to live there, not even in a shared house. When are the big SV companies doing what's right and creating new offices in other cities where there's talented developers that can't afford to move to / live in SV and/or its shit conditions?
- minhazm 9y ago
  Everyone I know who got a job out of college in SV/SF got at least a 100k total comp package (usually more). Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and all of the bigger companies offer ~150k total comp or more to new grads. That said, some start-ups definitely do pay less, but it's not so bad that you can't at least get a room mate.

wyclif 9y ago

The same reason they don't like hiring women coders and coders over 30 (because of ageism). They use "culture fit" to shield them from diversity. I hate to be cynical, though. It's just that I know too much about how tech companies operate. There's no doubt in my mind that there are more black coders working now than there were when I got into this industry, and that's a good thing. They just don't have much visibility now, but I think that too will change. Baby steps...

danso 9y ago
If it makes you feel better, most companies in every industry have similar biases.
- expertentipp 9y ago
  so those culturally unfit, once on the other side, where do they go?
  - danso 9y ago
    Where do job applicants who don't get hired normally go?

csa 9y ago

> "Silicon Valley is rife with Stanford and MIT graduates who started coding during childhood, won programming competitions in their spare time, and spent their summers interning at startups. At Howard, few of Pratt’s students fit that profile." > "None had programmed before college." I think these two quotes answer the headline question. Specifically, give one group of people a 4+ year head start in the field in addition to engaging in activities that will build confidence for the person when engaging in those activities (e.g., participating in and/or winning programming competitions in high school), is it really a surprise that the less-experienced group is grossly underrepresented in hiring? To make the above comparison not about race, how well are low-SES white people represented in Silicon Valley? Probably at equally low proportion for similar reasons -- they just don't have the same amount of experience as the highly competitive applicants. What's the solution? Reach out to underrepresented populations and get them started on programming much earlier. It's expensive and time consuming, but it's totally doable.

lvoudour 9y ago
Specifically, give one group of people a 4+ year head start in the field in addition to engaging in activities that will build confidence for the person when engaging in those activities (e.g., participating in and/or winning programming competitions in high school), is it really a surprise that the less-experienced group is grossly underrepresented in hiring? I think the assumption that to qualify for employment in SV you need to hack full products in your garage, participate in coding/science school competitions and have a MIT/Stanford degree, doesn't hold under scrutiny
- csa 9y ago
  Agreed. It wasn't my comment -- just a summary of the article. I almost wrote a parenthetical in my original reply to the effect that I doubted the ubiquitousness of the first quote. That said, I do think that the prior experience is a real issue. Rather than "winning programming competitions"or "hacking full projects in your garage", I do think it's safe to say that the vast majority of the folks who are competitive applicants to AppAmaGooFaceSoft started programming and were exposed directly or indirectly to CS ideas before they entered college. This may have been as simple as making a website for a school club (although frankly it was probably quite a bit more than that), but even actions as small as making a website open the door to a new world -- it is the beginning of the process of exploring new ideas and new problem spaces.

buro9 9y ago

The answer to all of these questions are the same uncomfortable truths that people don't wish to admit: * Classism * Racism * Sexism * <other>-ism The problems for the under-represented isn't just the end of the tunnel where people are quick to claim "But <insert minority> is not applying!"... it's the entire tunnel. It's really hard to be a <insert non-cis white male> in tech. Because at every step there is an obstacle. Those obstacles may be in your face (racism when you move to an area that is predominantly something else), or subtle things like you not being able to afford to live in SF because your minority doesn't have the implicit network strength of being the average white male and it's hard for you to find a place to live. The average developer that you may have seen from a minority background has already overcome more obstacles than their peers. But importantly, the vast majority never made it so far. The obstacles reduced their numbers long before. I look around at those who have made it, and the majority are white males from stable middle-class backgrounds. This stability and security, this confidence that a supportive family gives, this safety that a low-crime area brings, access to materials and space in which to learn, this reinforcement at every step that you are surrounded by "people like you" and that you deserve to be there... is such a huge thing that is taken for granted. If you're a white male in tech, consider whether you could have made it to where you are without all of that. Of course there are lots of individual exceptions (I spent 2.5 years sleeping rough and come from a background of poverty and abuse)... but by and large, this is your privilege and it is also why the numbers for <minority> aren't there. For those that do make it... support them and help them. They've had it hard and deserve not just what they've achieved but more too.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> I look around at those who have made it, and the majority are white males from stable middle-class backgrounds. This stability and security, this confidence that a supportive family gives, this safety that a low-crime area brings, access to materials and space in which to learn, this reinforcement at every step that you are surrounded by "people like you" and that you deserve to be there... is such a huge thing that is taken for granted. You imply that white people are privileged because they're white, yet look at this sentence. It seems to me like poor white people _don't_ go into tech. Couldn't socioeconomic/cultural differences explain the discrepancies and not systemic racism/sexism/-ism? Just because statistically more white people grow up middle class does _not_ mean that all white people are privileged. Acting like they are is discriminatory.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

focaldev98 9y ago

I'm black myself(although just African not American). Science and technology are my ethos. With that out of the way, I think that a major contributor is the prejudice and stereotypes deriving from both the black & white communities.

stormbeard 9y ago

I'd be curious to see how the proportion of students hired into Google or FB from Howard compares to a normal school (not Stanford or MIT) with a CS program. Out of 30 students in the senior class, only 1 or 2 were hired on full time, which comes to be about 3-6%. I'm more concerned about whether the other 95% of students are finding technology-related jobs at all. If not, that would be a bigger problem in my opinion.

johngrefe 9y ago

I've thought about this a lot. If we're going after the most affected, it's going to be inner city youths. They have a lesser chance of making it through a 4 year, because their support structure isn't there because of historical injustices. K-12's can change their curriculum to focus more on tech for a specific type of application, instead of just "build an app, write node, learn python" generics. Especially if they can turn out talented students before HS graduation. >Microcontrollers >Auto Engine Management Systems >Civil Infrastructure >Utility Infrastructure I know these are by and large not the 'sexy' pie in the sky stuff most 'hot' investors chase, but these are upper-middle class jobs that there is less competition in, and are actually vitally important, meaning they will be around longer than SNAP inc. I think with intensive focus, the people who are placed in these programs, their kids will be completing CS 4 years and competing for 'creative applications in the valley', but the foundations need to be built up first.

legendiriz68 9y ago

Someone has to say this anyway: asians have highest average IQ, blacks lowest and whites are between them. Companies want smart people.

nova22033 9y ago

>Silicon Valley is rife with Stanford and MIT graduates who started coding during childhood, won programming competitions in their spare time They've identified the problem.. Maybe fund a program to teach programming to economically disadvantaged kids? in 10 years, those kids will be on a little more level playing field.

shidoshi 9y ago

This article was originally published in 2016, and HN had a lot to say then as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10944966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10944966