Computer programming is one of the most cognitively demanding professions in existence. Ability to program correlates pretty highly with cognitive test scores, such as the SAT Math. If you look at the top scorers on such tests in America, only about 1% are black. The ratio of black engineers in Silicon Valley matches what you would expect based on the test scores.

To see it visually, this is the bell curve based on millions of test results: http://i.imgur.com/zB1oENS.png?1 There are very simply very few black people in the far-right portion. This is not even a disputed fact (the dispute is mainly over why the curve is skewed and if it can be fixed; the existence of the skew is incontrovertible).

This was at least partly because of the way companies recruited: From 2001 to 2009, more than 20 percent of all black computer science graduates attended an historically black school, according to federal statistics—yet the Valley wasn’t looking for candidates at these institutions.

The average SAT scores at Howard are thoroughly mediocre, on par with second and tier state colleges, and you would not expect an elite school to concentrate on Howard, any more than you would expect it to concentrate on Southern Illinois University or the like. The only reason an elite company would recruit at Howard is for diversity reasons.

Foreman is strong-willed, which sometimes gets him in trouble. “I just chalked it up to soft skills, I guess,” he says, explaining that he and his interviewer had clashed. Pratt says he’d been “furious” to learn that Foreman had been passed over. Other companies said no, too.

So was he a good programmer or not? How do we the readers know that he good do the job and was passed up unfairly?

The phenomenon, “stereotype threat,” is getting more attention in the Valley, and companies have begun training employees to be aware of it.

The idea of stereotype threat is extremely dubious - http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-list-on-virtual-none...

“She doesn’t fit the profile of what people think of when they think of engineers. Even though people think of Silicon Valley as a big meritocracy, I don’t think that’s how it works.”

There are now a number of companies that do automated programming interviews -- Starfighter, Hacker Rank, etc. Do these manage to overcome stereotype threat? Do these blind interviews allow through more African-Americans? Before throwing around slanderous accusations, one should actually show that Silicon Valley is treating people with the same programming ability differently.

The sad thing is that these tech companies cannot just admit, "We don't recruit at Howard because the SAT scores are not there." Rather these companies have to pretend that anyone can be a great programmer if they just put in the work, and a lot of people end up with false hopes that only get crushed.