6 ms·

How To Be A Successful (African) American in Silicon Valley

115 points by dguido 14y ago

colmvp 14y ago
I find it odd that HN loves to upvote 'more women in tech' articles but never promotes any article related to increasing African American or the Latin American population in the tech community.
- coor 14y ago
  I for one only actually care about women in tech to improve my dating pool. Not sure what more minorities would do for me.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I care about the "people in tech" pool containing as high a percentage of the "qualified people who could be in tech" as possible, as both a hirer and a buyer/user of tech. If there are qualified women or minorities who aren't working in tech for artificial reasons (their early-childhood education deterring them, racism or sexism in the workplace, etc.), that affects me as a white man. I don't have as much self-interest in whether people from Ohio, Eskimos, or women are proportionally represented. (I sort of care in an abstract way, because tech jobs are great and a good way to live a happy life, but if there were some innate reason why gingers were comparatively far better at medicine than at tech, I wouldn't cry that there were few gingers in tech.) The nice thing about capitalism is that even with my own self-interested motivation, it tends to solve problems like this.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      > The nice thing about capitalism is that even with my own self-interested motivation, it tends to solve problems like this. It really doesn't, for two reasons. 1) the rational actor model is a bad abstraction, and irrational prejudice can be an important factor; 2) there are various "bootstrap" problems in any given field that can keep unbalanced equillibria even in situations where discriminatory forces aren't actively pushing things towards those equillibria. Women in tech is actually a striking example of this phenomenon. If you look at "qualified" in terms of something measurable like Math SAT scores above 600 (typical for a decent engineering program), women are dramatically underrepresented relative to their qualifications. You would think there would be strong pressures to get more women into the field, given the ostensible shortage of engineers, but companies make no such attempts (partly because the self-selection happens long before they can really influence things, and partly because of "boostrap" issues).
      - rdl 14y ago
        My experience (MIT, late 1990s) was that there were about 45% females to 55% males (+/- 5%), and in some programs (Biology, Earth Science) there were more females than males. CS undergrad was maybe 65:35, and Physics/Math were more skewed. I'm assuming everyone was approximately the same level of qualified coming in. I think "med school leads to a great career" was a major factor. Among people hiring, it's pretty common to actively search out new sources of candidates -- "Australia", x new education program, prior military service hires, etc. I agree the early stage problems need to be solved by someone other than those hiring in the short term, but it's absolutely the case that a qualified (female, black, whatever) candidate will get a fair shot at many (most?) companies today. In large organizations, there is still some pressure to hire those candidates preferentially, and even in a small startup, hiring female technical employees early is preferred because it makes it a lot easier to hire even 20-30% female employees later, vs. an all-male 20 person company trying to hire its first female technical employee. (Sorry, but I don't count employees as a single class -- if 100% of your engineers are male and you have a female office manager, that's not really the same thing as a company like Quora where the first hire was a great designer and front-end developer who happened to be both from Facebook and female.) So, hopefully solving the "demand side" also helps people solve the "supply side".
        rayiner 14y ago
        There was an MIT study in the 1980s and 1990s that found that females were outperforming their SAT Math relative to males when it game to college GPA. So they adjusted the admissions process. As a result, females come in with roughly a 30-point lower SAT Math, but ultimately end up having similar GPAs once in school. So to get that 45/55 mix, the school did have to take affirmative measures. That said, MIT is way ahead of the industry on this. Only 18% of engineering graduates last year were women. This is despite the fact that about 45% of all high school seniors who score 600+ on the SAT Math, and 40% of all high school seniors who score 700+ on the SAT Math, are girls. Even at the perfect 800 level, it's 33% girls. And this isn't directed at you, but whenever I see "aptitude" in these discussions I get skeptical. A lot of people don't agree with the findings in the "Bell Curve", but even if we take those results to be completely true, the fact of the matter is that the differences don't really matter that much in the range we're talking about. It's an explanation for why there are so many fewer female Einsteins, not why there are so many fewer female Cisco engineers. And it's not even the math and tedium. I was pretty shocked to find that half of Big-4 accountants are women. About 30% of one major Big-4 firm's partners are women. These numbers blow away anything you see in engineering, in a field that is arguably much more numerically-intensive and boring. The fact is that the other professions are leaving engineering in the dust when it comes to making representation in the field equal to aptitude. Accounting firms and law firms are dealing with the next issue--which is how to have a strong representation of female partners while dealing with the fact that the partnership push coincides with women's prime reproductive years. And they're making progress on that issue. Engineering is in the rearview mirror, hanging with the neanderthals in banking.
  - joenathan 14y ago
    What about minority women? that's a two for one.
    - flexxaeon 14y ago
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619
- arcatek 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure this post was marked [Dead] few hours ago.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Are blacks underrepresented among engineers, relative to their representation among college graduates? There's also the issue that male-female disparities are generally more tractable problems. One of the saving graces of gender inequality is that it's not deeply tied in with socioeconomic class.
anewguy 14y ago
"Underrepresentation does not equal racism" contradicts the academic party line ("systemic racism"). If a white person said something like that, they would get a lecture in "denying privilege". If an asian person said it, he would be ignored. But I agree that the author's way of thinking is far healthier for any given individual. Which is why the author is so successful.
- flexxaeon 14y ago
  It doesn't contradict "systemic racism", it clarifies it. i.e. "a college degree does not equal intelligence"
- slurgfest 14y ago
  What do you mean by "academic party line"? The university system is not a party (let alone a communist party). Phrases like "denying privilege" are not general to all of academia, they are specific to certain people. What is your interest in portraying all academics as people who deliver lectures in denying privilege (or whatever)? Leave the people who develop knowledge and disseminate it for the rest of society alone with your political agenda.
  - anewguy 14y ago
    I have never heard an academic in a race-studies, Sociology, or Communications department seriously grapple with criticisms of the "systemic racism" hypothesis for the white/black performance gap, and nor have I heard any other hypothesis offered. Students and professors outside those departments dutifully recite the same theories. As far as I can see, academia is a den of groupthink and cultural Marxism when it comes to such issues.
    - azakai 14y ago
      Steven Pinker is a highly influential academic who criticizes positions like "underrepresentation implies discrimination". See for example his best-seller The Blank Slate (2002).
guylhem 14y ago
Excellent article, full of excellent thoughts and ideas. I hope it'll remain frontpage material to clear some misrepresentations. "Heard Yeezy was racist, well, I guess that’s on one basis, I only like green faces." I guess I'm like Kanye then: I'm green-biased, because in the end, that's the only thing that matter - profits :-) "Underrepresentation does not equal racism" is also a great idea to cite - who cares about one's representation? Profits are what matters. Is there a white resentment about having too few white players in the NBA? As long as they are good and get well paid, who cares?
- phaus 14y ago
  I don't blame my not being in the NBA on the fact that I am white. I blame it on the fact that I'm short and I suck at basketball.
- dasil003 14y ago
  That quote reminds me of Mitch Hedberg's color joke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El65C0u_J3U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El65C0u_J3U
- Anechoic 14y ago
  Profits are what matters No, opportunity is what matters. "Underrepresentation does not equal racism" is true but it may (and I stress "may") be an indicator of disparate impact, and so underrepresentation shouldn't be dismissed. Paul Judge worked his way to the top, and I'm happy for him. That doesn't mean that the only reason other folks haven't (of any race/gender/background) is because they didn't work hard enough.
- majormajor 14y ago
  So the last line made me think: why do I hate the idea of the All-American Basketball Alliance[1], but support programs to increase diversity in software? But it's not a contradiction: I have seen nothing to lead me to believe that a talented player of any race will not get a fair chance in the NBA. It's all about winning, but the opportunity is there for everyone. So isn't SV all about winning too? Yes, it is—but we know a lot less about what leads to winning. There are no draft combines where everyone gets show what they can do. Nobody writes code competitively directly against other programmers on TV to prove they can produce at a high level. Companies play it by ear. The NBA knows how to evaluate talent. We don't. Here's a fun example: "PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. No PayPal people would ever have used the world “hoops.” Probably no one even knew how to play “hoops.” Basketball would be bad enough. But “hoops?” That guy clearly wouldn’t have fit in. He’d have had to explain to the team why he was going to go play hoops on a Thursday night. And no one would have understood him."[2] Welp, guess I wouldn't have been able to get hired at PayPal. Not only do I like to play basketball, I've said "shooting hoops" a lot. You're going to turn down someone who aced your tests because of a hobby and the phrase he used to describe it? You really think that's the secret to success? You're flying by the seat of your pants in a world without good metrics and you don't know which things you did contributed to your success and which things didn't. You're actively discouraging diversity of culture (which is not directly the same thing as diversity of gender/race, but it makes it a lot harder to have the latter). And it's that still-sometimes-present active discouragement of diversity that I find frustrating about many parts of the programmer community. [1] a basketball league venture in the southern US that required players be white, that I believe folded quickly a couple of years ago [2] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels...
daybowbow 14y ago
Really appreciate this article - very thoughtful. Re: the "Increase the pipeline" section, I agree this is a great place to start. But while "the reasoning behind such skewed ambitions begins at home," I think it's also more of a media problem. We can name rap artists and basketball players because for the media, sports & entertainment are king. Thankfully, we can point our kids to Barack Obama - my daughter already knows "Pesident Obama" she's not even two yet, and our kids will aspire towards a broader set of ambitions. But we could also use a little help from the media highlighting achievers in other realms.
azarias 14y ago
As an aside, I am amazed how much conversation CNN's story has fueled and continues to fuel...and it has been so many years! Whether it was a good representation or not, it was one of the first to really discuss the topic, and there is a lot of value in that.
- flexxaeon 14y ago
  Yep. That and I'm sure that it sparked more people of color to move upon tech.
ari_elle 14y ago
Great article indeed! During all of the arguments he made i couldn't help but think about the "lack of successful women in tech/business"-discussion that is - i guess - currently going on not only in my country. 1) Underrepresentation does not equal racism or bias against women 2) News reports are focusing on the wrong part of the story and there are many women very successful already 3) Greed trumps gender And also when he mentions possible solutions: -) Increase the pipeline Exactly. Often many women in my classes were very good at maths/science, yet only very few went on to really study something like maths/science or something strongly business-related.
thisrandomguy 14y ago
This article is great.

115 points by dguido 14y ago

I find it odd that HN loves to upvote 'more women in tech' articles but never promotes any article related to increasing African American or the Latin American population in the tech community.

coor 14y ago
I for one only actually care about women in tech to improve my dating pool. Not sure what more minorities would do for me.
- rdl 14y ago
  I care about the "people in tech" pool containing as high a percentage of the "qualified people who could be in tech" as possible, as both a hirer and a buyer/user of tech. If there are qualified women or minorities who aren't working in tech for artificial reasons (their early-childhood education deterring them, racism or sexism in the workplace, etc.), that affects me as a white man. I don't have as much self-interest in whether people from Ohio, Eskimos, or women are proportionally represented. (I sort of care in an abstract way, because tech jobs are great and a good way to live a happy life, but if there were some innate reason why gingers were comparatively far better at medicine than at tech, I wouldn't cry that there were few gingers in tech.) The nice thing about capitalism is that even with my own self-interested motivation, it tends to solve problems like this.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    > The nice thing about capitalism is that even with my own self-interested motivation, it tends to solve problems like this. It really doesn't, for two reasons. 1) the rational actor model is a bad abstraction, and irrational prejudice can be an important factor; 2) there are various "bootstrap" problems in any given field that can keep unbalanced equillibria even in situations where discriminatory forces aren't actively pushing things towards those equillibria. Women in tech is actually a striking example of this phenomenon. If you look at "qualified" in terms of something measurable like Math SAT scores above 600 (typical for a decent engineering program), women are dramatically underrepresented relative to their qualifications. You would think there would be strong pressures to get more women into the field, given the ostensible shortage of engineers, but companies make no such attempts (partly because the self-selection happens long before they can really influence things, and partly because of "boostrap" issues).
    - rdl 14y ago
      My experience (MIT, late 1990s) was that there were about 45% females to 55% males (+/- 5%), and in some programs (Biology, Earth Science) there were more females than males. CS undergrad was maybe 65:35, and Physics/Math were more skewed. I'm assuming everyone was approximately the same level of qualified coming in. I think "med school leads to a great career" was a major factor. Among people hiring, it's pretty common to actively search out new sources of candidates -- "Australia", x new education program, prior military service hires, etc. I agree the early stage problems need to be solved by someone other than those hiring in the short term, but it's absolutely the case that a qualified (female, black, whatever) candidate will get a fair shot at many (most?) companies today. In large organizations, there is still some pressure to hire those candidates preferentially, and even in a small startup, hiring female technical employees early is preferred because it makes it a lot easier to hire even 20-30% female employees later, vs. an all-male 20 person company trying to hire its first female technical employee. (Sorry, but I don't count employees as a single class -- if 100% of your engineers are male and you have a female office manager, that's not really the same thing as a company like Quora where the first hire was a great designer and front-end developer who happened to be both from Facebook and female.) So, hopefully solving the "demand side" also helps people solve the "supply side".
      - rayiner 14y ago
        There was an MIT study in the 1980s and 1990s that found that females were outperforming their SAT Math relative to males when it game to college GPA. So they adjusted the admissions process. As a result, females come in with roughly a 30-point lower SAT Math, but ultimately end up having similar GPAs once in school. So to get that 45/55 mix, the school did have to take affirmative measures. That said, MIT is way ahead of the industry on this. Only 18% of engineering graduates last year were women. This is despite the fact that about 45% of all high school seniors who score 600+ on the SAT Math, and 40% of all high school seniors who score 700+ on the SAT Math, are girls. Even at the perfect 800 level, it's 33% girls. And this isn't directed at you, but whenever I see "aptitude" in these discussions I get skeptical. A lot of people don't agree with the findings in the "Bell Curve", but even if we take those results to be completely true, the fact of the matter is that the differences don't really matter that much in the range we're talking about. It's an explanation for why there are so many fewer female Einsteins, not why there are so many fewer female Cisco engineers. And it's not even the math and tedium. I was pretty shocked to find that half of Big-4 accountants are women. About 30% of one major Big-4 firm's partners are women. These numbers blow away anything you see in engineering, in a field that is arguably much more numerically-intensive and boring. The fact is that the other professions are leaving engineering in the dust when it comes to making representation in the field equal to aptitude. Accounting firms and law firms are dealing with the next issue--which is how to have a strong representation of female partners while dealing with the fact that the partnership push coincides with women's prime reproductive years. And they're making progress on that issue. Engineering is in the rearview mirror, hanging with the neanderthals in banking.
- joenathan 14y ago
  What about minority women? that's a two for one.
  - flexxaeon 14y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619
arcatek 14y ago
I'm pretty sure this post was marked [Dead] few hours ago.
rayiner 14y ago
Are blacks underrepresented among engineers, relative to their representation among college graduates? There's also the issue that male-female disparities are generally more tractable problems. One of the saving graces of gender inequality is that it's not deeply tied in with socioeconomic class.

anewguy 14y ago

"Underrepresentation does not equal racism" contradicts the academic party line ("systemic racism"). If a white person said something like that, they would get a lecture in "denying privilege". If an asian person said it, he would be ignored. But I agree that the author's way of thinking is far healthier for any given individual. Which is why the author is so successful.

flexxaeon 14y ago
It doesn't contradict "systemic racism", it clarifies it. i.e. "a college degree does not equal intelligence"
slurgfest 14y ago
What do you mean by "academic party line"? The university system is not a party (let alone a communist party). Phrases like "denying privilege" are not general to all of academia, they are specific to certain people. What is your interest in portraying all academics as people who deliver lectures in denying privilege (or whatever)? Leave the people who develop knowledge and disseminate it for the rest of society alone with your political agenda.
- anewguy 14y ago
  I have never heard an academic in a race-studies, Sociology, or Communications department seriously grapple with criticisms of the "systemic racism" hypothesis for the white/black performance gap, and nor have I heard any other hypothesis offered. Students and professors outside those departments dutifully recite the same theories. As far as I can see, academia is a den of groupthink and cultural Marxism when it comes to such issues.
  - azakai 14y ago
    Steven Pinker is a highly influential academic who criticizes positions like "underrepresentation implies discrimination". See for example his best-seller The Blank Slate (2002).

guylhem 14y ago

Excellent article, full of excellent thoughts and ideas. I hope it'll remain frontpage material to clear some misrepresentations. "Heard Yeezy was racist, well, I guess that’s on one basis, I only like green faces." I guess I'm like Kanye then: I'm green-biased, because in the end, that's the only thing that matter - profits :-) "Underrepresentation does not equal racism" is also a great idea to cite - who cares about one's representation? Profits are what matters. Is there a white resentment about having too few white players in the NBA? As long as they are good and get well paid, who cares?

phaus 14y ago
I don't blame my not being in the NBA on the fact that I am white. I blame it on the fact that I'm short and I suck at basketball.
dasil003 14y ago
That quote reminds me of Mitch Hedberg's color joke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El65C0u_J3U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El65C0u_J3U
Anechoic 14y ago
Profits are what matters No, opportunity is what matters. "Underrepresentation does not equal racism" is true but it may (and I stress "may") be an indicator of disparate impact, and so underrepresentation shouldn't be dismissed. Paul Judge worked his way to the top, and I'm happy for him. That doesn't mean that the only reason other folks haven't (of any race/gender/background) is because they didn't work hard enough.
majormajor 14y ago
So the last line made me think: why do I hate the idea of the All-American Basketball Alliance[1], but support programs to increase diversity in software? But it's not a contradiction: I have seen nothing to lead me to believe that a talented player of any race will not get a fair chance in the NBA. It's all about winning, but the opportunity is there for everyone. So isn't SV all about winning too? Yes, it is—but we know a lot less about what leads to winning. There are no draft combines where everyone gets show what they can do. Nobody writes code competitively directly against other programmers on TV to prove they can produce at a high level. Companies play it by ear. The NBA knows how to evaluate talent. We don't. Here's a fun example: "PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. No PayPal people would ever have used the world “hoops.” Probably no one even knew how to play “hoops.” Basketball would be bad enough. But “hoops?” That guy clearly wouldn’t have fit in. He’d have had to explain to the team why he was going to go play hoops on a Thursday night. And no one would have understood him."[2] Welp, guess I wouldn't have been able to get hired at PayPal. Not only do I like to play basketball, I've said "shooting hoops" a lot. You're going to turn down someone who aced your tests because of a hobby and the phrase he used to describe it? You really think that's the secret to success? You're flying by the seat of your pants in a world without good metrics and you don't know which things you did contributed to your success and which things didn't. You're actively discouraging diversity of culture (which is not directly the same thing as diversity of gender/race, but it makes it a lot harder to have the latter). And it's that still-sometimes-present active discouragement of diversity that I find frustrating about many parts of the programmer community. [1] a basketball league venture in the southern US that required players be white, that I believe folded quickly a couple of years ago [2] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-5-notes-essay http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels...

daybowbow 14y ago

Really appreciate this article - very thoughtful. Re: the "Increase the pipeline" section, I agree this is a great place to start. But while "the reasoning behind such skewed ambitions begins at home," I think it's also more of a media problem. We can name rap artists and basketball players because for the media, sports & entertainment are king. Thankfully, we can point our kids to Barack Obama - my daughter already knows "Pesident Obama" she's not even two yet, and our kids will aspire towards a broader set of ambitions. But we could also use a little help from the media highlighting achievers in other realms.

azarias 14y ago

As an aside, I am amazed how much conversation CNN's story has fueled and continues to fuel...and it has been so many years! Whether it was a good representation or not, it was one of the first to really discuss the topic, and there is a lot of value in that.

flexxaeon 14y ago
Yep. That and I'm sure that it sparked more people of color to move upon tech.

ari_elle 14y ago

Great article indeed! During all of the arguments he made i couldn't help but think about the "lack of successful women in tech/business"-discussion that is - i guess - currently going on not only in my country. 1) Underrepresentation does not equal racism or bias against women 2) News reports are focusing on the wrong part of the story and there are many women very successful already 3) Greed trumps gender And also when he mentions possible solutions: -) Increase the pipeline Exactly. Often many women in my classes were very good at maths/science, yet only very few went on to really study something like maths/science or something strongly business-related.

thisrandomguy 14y ago

This article is great.