Why Tech Degrees Are Not Putting More Blacks and Hispanics into Tech Jobs
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I can expand later if anyone is interested in a real conversation.
Sure tech is generally non-black, but there are load of East Asians and South Asians. It's not exactly the Augusta National Golf Club.
There are a lot of places in corporate information technology in the US where tech is "very very" Indian and a white or black or hispanic person may very well be the only non-Indian (or even US citizen or permanent resident) in the room or on the team.
The point still stands though if you replace the word "white" with "non-black / hispanic". There are vast cultural and systemic barriers that some minorities go through in the United States (black / latino) to get to becoming a software engineer, and not others (Asian).
There remains pernicious and not widely appreciated systemic bias in this industry, and until it's even acknowledged we're not going to have much luck in tackling it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11102712
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587
I would really recommend this article http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...
1. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...
Edit: If my comment seems unnecessary, it's because MollyR edited-in a link to the Slate Star Codex post before I finished mine. I'm glad I'm not the only one who's read SSC's rebuttal.
If a college has a large white population, most white people will be friends with mostly white people. Maybe a few start a company. They refer to their networks for early employees. Those networks are mostly white. The early employees become managers and hire primarily through the same channels, perpetuating the imbalance (as defined by having vastly unequal representation compared to the general population).
I have trouble prescribing solutions to diversity imbalances because it is hard to say where and when the imbalance is a problem. The only thing I can imagine that would be helpful is to have more people of different backgrounds engage each other on each other's turf. Make friends. Maybe start a business. Let the networks expand from day one. Otherwise, you're always playing catch-up.
As an aside, I attended RIT, which, aside from being overwhelmingly white, contains the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which has an awe-inspiring diversity in its student body. That proximity taught me a lot about deaf and hard-of-hearing culture, which, because of the aforementioned incredible racial diversity, taught me a lot about lives other than my own as well.
I can't begin to understand how it is an issue, and I'm black (and European). I don't care about the color or the sex of my coworkers. What difference does it make? you can't relate to white people? No the main issue is networking and going out of one's own "sphere" or microcosm.
> So some of the students may be opting out simply because they want a more diverse workplace
If they really like programming then they should worry about programming first and foremost, not how diverse is their environment. But maybe it's because of my upbringing, when I was the only black in a class of 30 students, I didn't have the time or any interest in worrying about the "blackness" of the classroom. I didn't have the time to worry about my tastes being "black" or white or whatever.
Do some people have it easier because they are white ? Sure, people trust their kin more, and you talking about being "only black person in the room" is in my opinion the expression of that fact. What is true for white people is also true for black people, it's human nature.
Read my comment later, where I mentioned that I have more white friends than black friends. I have no problem with white people. And no, I don't care about the color or sex of my coworkers. Instead, I was describing a very real phenomenom which may have been overlooked in the article.
> If they really like programming then they should worry about programming first and foremost, not how diverse is their environment. But maybe it's because of my upbringing, when I was the only black in a class of 30 students, I didn't have the time or any interest in worrying about the "blackness" of the classroom. I didn't have the time to worry about my tastes being "black" or white or whatever.
Not sure if you or I should say what those students should be worrying about. I think you may be missing my point. I made no mention about what those students should do. Instead, I talked about what they may be doing.
> Sure, people trust their kin more, and you talking about being "only black person in the room" is in my opinion the expression of that fact.
Actually that came from my personal experience (and that of many other POC) of trusting people who are not my kin, and then having race be brought up in a way that was detrimental to me.
> Instead, I was describing a very real phenomenom which may have been overlooked in the article.
Ok, I understand and I agree with you then.
> Not sure if you or I should say what those students should be worrying about. I think you may be missing my point. I made no mention about what those students should do. Instead, I talked about what they may be doing.
Agreed.
> Actually that came from my personal experience (and that of many other POC) of trusting people who are not my kin, and then having race be brought up in a way that was detrimental to me.
You know it happened to me too and no need to say that in Europe people are less PC than in US. That's of course unacceptable and every time it happened I fought it. It's often more ignorance than ideology, i.e. casual racism. What I'm seriously worried about is all that "reverse racism" that is also becoming casual in US. It doesn't build trust between cultures/minorities, It's just making things worse in my opinion.
But I would argue tech is a meritocracy - not perfect - but very much a meritocracy.
"Be the change you want".
And plenty people of color put on race blinders or never encounter any issues, but that doesn't mean hostile environments do not exist. In my personal experience, it varies wildly from city to city and company to company. I've worked at companies that celebrate black history month and companies where white managers think it's fun to touch black women's hair.
Well put. Thanks for posting valuable comments instead of responding in kind—it greatly improved this thread.
It takes longer for reflective and informative comments to show up than it does for reflexive ones, but they do eventually. It takes time to think and write something good. And often a thoughtful comment only gets posted because someone feels compelled to reply to a glib one. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184489.
The problem is systemic from pre-school to the career fair. I believe it will change. But no one lever will do the full trick.
Or the kind of systemic that ensures their school districts are poorer and underfunded.
Or the kind of systemic that ensures you take the middle of the road when a black guy in a hoodie walks towards you in the same sidewalk.
Sure there aren't signs designating black and white water fountains but just because something is not written on a sign or on the law books doesn't mean its not written in the consciousness of the people.
The biggest reason for this in my opinion is the historical obfuscation.
Sure, we kind of studied the Civil Rights movement but we never really learned about Dr. King's deeper message, only that he "had a dream", and then segregation ended and everything was "normal" after that.
It wasn't until years after graduating that I began reading Dr. King's speeches that and the underlying causes of the racial divisions finally made sense, allowing me to let go of the anger I had held from bad experiences related to the racial animosity.
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentse...
Because I don't know a single person who is in the field of IT whose parents were in IT. Positions barely existed until the 90s.
No one has yet explained why even segregation today in some part of the country is affecting ethnic groups NOT interested or apt in coding to the level of getting the jobs.
Those kids didn't develop in vitro in some abstract new environment.
They had parents, grandparents, neighborhoods, school districts, schools, family fortune (or lack thereof) potential employers (themselves born in the 60' 60's and 80s) etc.
Anybody who thinks those things don't affect the nurture, career and prospects of a young person, or that those things change in a few decades, are deluded.
Usually the same people also fail to understand the notion of statistics, and think that outliers that beat the odds and rose to become successful entrepreneurs or whatever from such upbringings translate to "it's equally easy for whites and blacks to become successful, here, this kid proved it, but most blacks are just lazy".
In other words people who don't understand that most white people play life in easy mode, where most blacks do not -- and point to some "hard mode" winners as if that means everything is equally easy for everybody.
http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
Now if you can refute the source, I think that's great because I have a hard time believing it myself given the common narrative. One argument might be that somehow the amounts of money given somehow are squandered other ways, but that doesn't discount the amount given, it would point to the system where it's squandered not the funding itself.
The source is meaningless. Visit some schools in typical white districts and in typical black districts and compare them.
It's easy to have to spend more public money for poor districts since there's much more infrastructure work to be done, plus the students parents don't have enough to spend on their kids education in the first place.
It was the general "use" I used (e.g. the phrase could be read "that ensure one takes the middle of the road"). So, even if not you, then hell of a lot of people. Did you think that people who act in that "certain way" are unique snowflakes, and that their behavior is a personal curiosity that doesn't have historical roots and cultural influences?
>Like I said before, you're throwing out ghosts that you can't fight against specifically, to reinforce a claim of what causes entire ethnicities to have interest and aptitude in coding and IT work.
Well, I like some Lynard Skynard myself, but I wouldn't take it that far...
Having gotten my ass kicked intellectually repeatedly by black and hispanic students: no, those backgrounds are not a liability.
The two are not mutually exclusive. I would argue that a very significant part of the problem that Blacks and Hispanics face (besides simple discrimination on the part of people in positions of power -- which is very real, as studies of responses to applications in various context from people with stereotypically Black or Hispanic names vs. otherwise identical applications without that feature) is attitudes toward societal institutions and mainstream culture in their respective subcultures that are a direct product of problems in the broader society (including the schooling system), both currently and over the past several centuries (the longer time especially for black subculture) including, over much of that time, overt de jure subjugation and exclusion (which while it didn't directly impact young people today, is recent enough that lots of them have living relatives who did directly experience it) followed by covert (but still present, see earlier comment about applications) discrimination and neglect.
Arguing over whether A or B is the problem is pointless when A causes B which then contributes back to A.
This is of course one datapoint, but the university I went to (top engineering school in the Northeast US) hosts a big panel for computer-field majors at the annual admissions event. Any students remotely interested in technical majors are invited to attend - you don't even need to be accepted to the university. The marketing for the event makes it as clear as possible that no prior programming experience is required, they just want to get people excited about computing. When I served on the panel as a CS student, I looked out the audience and saw a fully packed room (300+ people) of almost entirely white/Asian male prospective students and their parents. At that point, how do you recover and get diverse people? How do you get people interested when everyone showing up fits the same description?
In my view, the problem starts way before college/job seeking. I was lucky, as a white male, that my parents noticed and encouraged my technical interests at an early age. By the time I was entering college, I had years of programming experience, not even at any company, but just working on my laptop in my bedroom. It kills me that so many minorities and women never even get that opportunity. Parents of young girls don't seem to see/nurture those interests, and sometimes actively encourage them not to go into technology. It makes perfect sense that later they're not interested in pursuing college/careers in computers.
I have worked at companies where the people doing hiring have literally whispered (since it is illegal to say so) that they are desperate to hire minorities and women. I once heard someone say, "Man, I would love to hire this person, but I have to be fair, and if they were male I would have rejected them immediately".
Yes, tech companies need to be as accepting as possible towards minorities and women. Yes, minorities and women need role models in the industry. But we've got to start at the source at the problem and get parents to allow their children to be interested in computers in the first place!
Schooling is particularly worrying - it's got a troubling focus on instilling conformity, and AFAIK that's both more effective on women and particularly damaging to creative work like computer programming.
There's a knowledge and understanding gap on both sides---both in terms of what companies understand about how students are prepared and what schools understand about what skillsets students need to excel in technology fields. It turns out outreach and active participation can be valuable to bridge that gap.
And if you want that to happen, you need to set up incentives such that it's in tech companies best interests to do so. You can't just say that things would be better if something were to happen - identifying problems is the easy part. Identifying what needs to change and how to change it is the hard part.
My entryway into computers was "I want to build a website like this one, but better." This same opportunity exists for everyone with a web browser, which is most everyone. You had the additional fortune of parents seeking out opportunities for you, but it was not necessary, and I suspect you'd have found your way to tech eventually even with no external support.
Maybe it's painful because you want more diversity in your life? Why not fulfill that desire outside of work? Maybe it's painful to work on legacy stuff that you're sure with a more diverse mindset wouldn't be so crufty? I think we've come impressively far with the current (and in the past "worse") state of affairs, clearly we don't need the diversity to accomplish greatness. I'm on a team with Indians, Koreans, Chinese...and two other white guys. Our manager is black. Our manager's manager is a woman. I don't think this diversity gives us any technical advantage, but since we're all competent, there's not really any disadvantage, this is just how the dice fell for us. The only way this diversity impacts me is that my name gets mispronounced (and vice versa for some of them). But as you mention there are a lot of diversity advocates who want diversity over merit for some mysterious reason and will actively sabotage teams to get it.
Research has found that during hiring, managers are biased against black-sounding names on résumés, for instance, and interviewers weigh too heavily whether they’d want to hang out with someone.
This may happen in other jobs, but in my 20 years in tech, I have never seen this. Go to any good tech company, and see the odd folks walking about. And yet they'll have an issue with black or hispanic folks? I doubt it.
Network does play a role, I will agree. But what plays a bigger role is your technical chops; and it is very easy today to demonstrate your skills via SO or Github.
It's typically called "culture fit".
EDIT: Not all culture fit is bad, I think it's important that people can work together. But it can easily disguise any number of subjective biases, many of which you may not be aware.
For example, bias against black-sounding names is a real thing. It doesn't really matter if you personally have seen it, or if you think you haven't seen it. It's still real and quantifiable.
Most of us should continue to be skeptical that statistical analyses about these things must be carried out robustly and stand up to statistical grokking ... but conditional on that, believe the data and not your gut.
Without considering where the data came from, under what assumptions was it collected, when was it collected, etc. how can you blindly lay faith in some "data"? I have some data which says N horses died on the streets of San Francisco last year; will you believe it? It just so happens that "last year" was 1895. Doesn't that make the "data" useless?
Show me any other major industrial sector where a 17-year-old can start a company and be bought out for $30MM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D'Aloisio#Summly Show me where highschool dropouts can make more than Harvard MBAs.
Yes, tech has problems with gender or ageism; but skin color is hardly ever an issue. In fact, if it is, it is in the other direction. I had a friend who graduated from a top CS school and couldn't get a faculty position. The Chair at one department actually told him: if you were a woman or minority, I'd hire you right away.
BTW: I'm not implying that everything is great. But compared to other sectors, tech is actually a pretty decent place to be if you don't "fit in" into the convention.
I didn't say blindly believe the data or blindly believe your gut.
But many people use their anecdotal experiences as justification to deny clearly significant trends because they personally "never observed it."
> Show me any other major industrial sector where a 17-year-old can start a company and be bought out for $30MM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D'Aloisio#Summly Show me where highschool dropouts can make more than Harvard MBAs.
In a lot of ways these are not good things about our field. They represent a lot of the ways that toxic culture and a flight from quality are pervasive in tech. In tech, it's rarely about actually adding value and often much more about extracting rents from marketing and status. Just like it is in tons of other fields.
Tech is not like this because tech is more meritocratic. Tech is absolutely not meritocratic.
> but skin color is hardly ever an issue.
What are you basing this on? As far as I can tell, only your vague assessment of your personal observations. OK. That's not nothing. But because a lot of people present compelling arguments that it is an issue, I'm generally not just going to take some anecdotal reasoning. There are other explanations. Maybe you've been around racial bias and just not noticed it. Or maybe you've been extremely lucky to avoid being near it. Either of those are more plausible that the unlikely case that your anecdotal experience just happens to be more representative than all of the principled studies (which yes, always have flaws, but no that's not a good reason to believe their basic premise is entirely wrong).
I've been in Tech about 25 to 30 years. I'm sad to report that I have seen it happen a time or two in tech. But what I will say... is that before I went into "pure" tech, it happened in other fields in a much more overt manner.
I was a peon at DDB Needham in Chicago a long time ago and was talking to a friend of mine when one of the VP's came into her cube. The VP wanted her to go through the resumes and circular file all of the ones who were black. My friend asked how would she know if they were black... the woman said "Oh... you'll know. Look at the names."
As it happened some other friends of mine were talking about starting a company using this really cool thing called "WinSock" to do networking. So I went home that night and joined them. I'd had enough of the BigCo lifestyle. Two really good exits later ... here I am. So I really ought to thank that VP lady.
I ran into that attitude a couple of times in tech over the 25 or so years since then... but not NEARLY as often as when I was doing the BigCo thing. It does happen though. And I tended to run away from those people as fast and as far as I could.
The only way a company should be responsible for hiring underrepresented minorities is if there was a market inefficiency to be exploited. And even then, that's a responsibility to their shareholders, not to society. And "we hire black people because we don't have to pay them as much" probably wouldn't go over too well, anyway.
Hiring managers and executives should use all of the tools at their disposal in the context of recruitment and hiring - including moral and ethical judgement.
Setting moral responsibilities aside - if you want to hire talented, passionate engineers like me, you will get serious about building teams with people from diverse backgrounds.
There's a pretty major leap in logic, there. What does diversity have to do with talented, passionate engineering teams? Companies like Honda and Toyota have some of the least diverse engineering teams on the planet, and yet they have a well-earned reputation for engineering excellence.
You may want a company to take diversity seriously, and there are many others who feel the same way. But it doesn't follow that maximizing diversity is therefor an imperative for companies that want to have world-class teams. In fact diversity seems to be orthogonal to competence.
I wasn't delving into the merits of diversity - I believe in it; I'm seeing it put to the test every day at my company, and I like what I see.
> it doesn't follow that maximizing diversity is therefor an imperative for companies that want to have world-class teams.
Diversity isn't about addition/subtraction, nor is it calculus; it's not even sociology, macroeconomics, or socioeconomics.
Diversity is about adaptive systems.
> In fact diversity seems to be orthogonal to competence.
I'll concede this point, but only with the substitution of "productivity" for "competence". Homogenous teams can outperform diverse teams, IN THE SHORT TERM.
Diversity may lead directly to inefficiency and conflict. In the short term, these are painful inhibitors to productivity.
In the long term, diversity of backgrounds, capabilities and perspectives - properly aligned - can be a huge asset.
If you are building a new company, and you want to beat the world, you'd be foolish to hire a bunch of people who think about things the same way that you do.
Er, because they're part of society?
And because in the case of giants of the corporate world, like Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, they actually do have the wherewithal to influence that society to a degree that even governments often don't?
Corporations are, like Westphalian nation-states, explicitly amoral entities. The extent to which they behave morally is due to market and/or political pressure, not any inherent moral judgement.
Apple makes consumer devices. That's their business. They have a responsibility to make the greatest possible profit selling those devices. That's where their responsibility begins and ends.
Now, there are all sorts of moral dimensions that can affect their decisions. If their phones were made with slave labour, people might not buy them and talent might not want to work for them. But the reason Apple doesn't employ slave labour isn't because it is a moral entity; it isn't. Apple doesn't employ slave labour because doing so would hurt its bottom line.
If you want companies to behave in an ethical fashion, you need to align legal, social, market, tax, and other incentives in order to push them in that direction. Expecting them to do so out of the goodness of their hearts is quixotic: they have no hearts with which to be good.
You mean, if I want the big companies to do good (or "not do evil") I have to pay up to them?
But the people who make up those big companies also have to live in the same society as everyone else. So they should already have an incentive to do good to those societies- they will personally benefit from that good-doing. Why do they need me, or anyone else, to provide that incentive?
We all live in the same world, we all have a responsibility to be morally considerate in it. "Companies" are not "amoral entities", neither are nations. Because they are groups of lots of people, who all are subject to moral judgement.
"I was just following orders" is not an excuse anymore, and neither should "I was just doing my job" be.
It means you need to align incentives. Those can be positive (tax breaks for hiring veterans) or negative (penalties for violating antitrust laws), but they are incentives nonetheless.
>So they should already have an incentive to do good to those societies- they will personally benefit from that good-doing.
Do you, individually, benefit more from living in a society where mining companies don't dump toxic chemicals in rivers in third world countries, or from making your quarterly bonuses? This is a classic tragedy of the commons.
>Why do they need me, or anyone else, to provide that incentive?
Because companies are amoral profit-maximization constructs.
>"Companies" are not "amoral entities", neither are nations.
There are many corporations and politicians who are more than happy to indulge that fantasy in exchange for your money or vote.
You can rant and rave about evil corporations till you're blue in the face, and you won't change a damned thing. Corporations respond to incentives, not moral pleas. Change the incentives if you want to change the behaviour.
Then again, software engineering has only been a thing for about 40-50 odd years and is young as compared to other professions, so I guess things will change.
Tech is like that. There are jerks, and there are racists, and there are abusive personalities. There are real, definite problems. It's still closer to a meritocracy than almost anywhere else. It's good enough that (to me) it's worth going into, problems and all. (Any individual situation may become toxic enough that you need to leave. But overall, I don't think it's bad enough to avoid, especially if that's where you would like to be.)
Black and hispanic students benefit from preferential admissions standards to medical, law, business and other graduate schools that can lead to higher salaries and higher social standing than computer programming.
Consider the extreme case of black students and medical school:
Black students who are competitive candidates for software engineering at top tech companies could (probably all) choose to study medicine and, very possibly, be admitted to specialist residency programs.
Average specialist pay is $284,000. Average primary care pay is $195,000.
I'm a white high school dropout, but I got a developer position at age 27 after rushing through a CS degree later in live which took about ~3 years. I work 40 hours a week and get a very livable $100k+ salary plus stock and benefits with negligible student debt all things considered (~$30k).
My point being, in a vacuum, getting on track to making a good wage as a developer has a lot fewer barriers with the lack of medical school and debt. Not to mention the free time I have outside of work and regular hours. Salary isn't everything.
I cannot speak for people of color and their experience who want to go through the same process as me. There are all kinds of barriers they experience that I don't. Neil DeGrasse Tyson (I know, I know...) had a good answer to the silly question "What's with chicks in science?", and the cultural / systemic barriers he had to go through to reach that point in life [1].
Edit: there are literally medical gigs available where you can sleep all night and get paid $100 / hour while sleeping (specialty surgical hospitals, where many nights there may not be a patient overnight, but they require an md on site). Many emergency rooms in rural areas may not see 2 patients at night, but need an er doctor on site.
Of course, this is against the narrative, just as is pointing out that lots of people one generation away from medieval levels of poverty in Asia seem to be doing better than USA blacks.
At any rate, if a lack of diversity is prima facie racism, then here's a scoop:
Reverse racism is certainly a real thing. Bigotry against white people is certainly a real thing. Go spend 5 minutes on salon.com, come back and tell me with a straight face that these people don't flirt with racism against white people.
As a black person, this kind of ideology isn't helping me. It's only helping pundits selling outrage.
Claiming Salon advocates for racism against whites promotes outrage. People are too sensitive.
Various groups had faced real discrimination in the job market - jews, italians, irish, etc. Here's one piece of historical trivia - Warren Buffett could not get his first Wall Street job because the company he really wanted to work for had a policy of only hiring Jews - because all other Wall Street banks would not.
Ie industries had real 'no X allowed' policies in place - not this 'Oh, I don't feel like being the only black guy in the room'. Well too bad for you - the job will pay money to someone else who doesn't necessarily have to be around people like them.
Today whites, Asians and Indians are supposed to feel bad because other ethnicities don't make sufficient effort to join the industry? I'm sorry, I don't.
How could any programmer worth his/her salt would not know about a whiteboard interview? I think that statement encapsulates it. No only are the schools they are graduating from are woefully inadequate, and they are entering a highly competitive field that with a fast changing landscape that is overwhelming for such grossly underprepared grads.
Ask yourself how come Asians & Jews do so well? They just work harder and push themselves more. I am as bleeding heart a liberal as they come and it pains me to see the lack of diversity, but culture has a huge part to play in it.
Wait, is it that or are the schools "woefully inadequate"??
>No only are the schools they are graduating from are woefully inadequate,
A lot of schools don't teach anything about interviewing. Its not academic. In fact, a lot of the training videos used in schools that do teach "job skills" to prepare students make no mention of white board interviews. They talk about being polite, wearing a suit, grooming, etc.
Judging an academic program on if they have ever been exposed to a whiteboard interview is fairly silly. I never saw on in 20 years.
As to your last paragraph, I'm not sure what role culture would play in introducing people to whiteboard interviews. I guess I grew up in a different environment, but I don't remember any of my urban white friends extolling the annual whiteboard festival. I can see it being a economic function of better schooling though.
Yikes, that's even worse. Some cultures will actively hold a suit against a candidate. I can't say I agree with that, but it's a little scary that they're giving stock advice to a highly dynamic field, very little of which is relevant. (Polite is good, being relaxed is better. Being suited is good, being comfortable is better.)
Well, stock advise is basically what text book publishers do.
Agreed, this is an indication of toxic culture on both sides.
HOWEVER. I would say aside from the grooming bit, the whiteboarding advice is the best possible advice for anyone. My mother can happily tell me to wear a suit, but she's not in a position to educate me about my field. A school had better fucking be, or what is the point? The technical knowledge—if they teach it at all—is itself is easier gained online than from a school.
Most places I've been wouldn't hold this against a new grad.
However, some places might hold this against a more senior person as being tone deaf toward the position he's going to be in. Nevertheless, I might wear a suit if the CEO, CTO, etc. was going to be part of my interview loop. But, I'll probably ditch the jacket and tie for the VP of Engineering.
I failed it miserably. Honestly, the experience left me kind of embarrassed and metaphorically beaten up for a while. Kind of like I'd claimed to be a programmer and had been revealed to be a fraud.
By this point (almost 20 years later), I've been through this wringer so many times that it seems like common knowledge. It doesn't really bother me at this point. But now that I think of it, yeah, I was unprepared for this and unaware of it.
I'm used to this sort of thing now, but I still think it's an usual and really unpleasant part of our industry. Most knowledge based fields really don't have anything like this sort of interview/exam (seriously, it's almost a pure exam, I think that describing it as an interview is simply misleading to people who aren't aware of what goes on in our field) - though most fields have a more standardized set of credentialing and degree programs.
I do think that the mysterious, unpredictable, and stressful nature of tech exam interviews deters a lot of people from entering or remaining in this field.
These are students. I would not expect them to start their education knowing about whiteboard interviews. At some point, all of us professional software developers were ignorant about how interviewing worked, and then we learned.
The question is: why are black and hispanic students not reaching this level of understanding at the same rate as whites and Asians? Perhaps they're not doing internships at the same rate? Some other reason? Regardless, this question deserves a serious answer, and not a flip dismissal based on stereotypes about work habits.
High Tech companies rarely recruited at my school (an HBCU) and when they did, they would send some a random manager to talk about diversity, not a recruiter.
Wow, talk about broad strokes. I guess I'll refer to you all my slacker asian and jew friends so they can make some easy cash.
As for "They work harder"... consider the impact of multiple generations of success, versus multiple generations of failure. I grew up what southerners call "poor white trash". I escaped, but barely, and mostly because I was very determined and very smart. When I landed at a high quality private college, I was utterly unprepared for the experience. I grew up listening to my father refer to the wealthy men he worked for as "educated mow-rawns", in that thick Kentucky accent of his. Going to college, surrounded by the children of lawyers and professors and the like, their family life was as alien to me as my dad bouncing in and out of jail was to them. I was embarrassed and ashamed.
Now, throw in the past century of crap that has kept even hardworking and talented black families down, and you can see where the problem might start.
See, I listen to a lot of rap, or "black music". And differences in taste aside, some of the stuff is REALLY complex. Look at Nas, Tupac, or even more recently, Kendrick Lamar. The sheer amount of detail these guys put into their art makes me feel bad about myself as a programmer. These guys work hard at their craft. But you know what, they're not coders.
But here's the thing, quoting Kendrick Lamars "Black Boy Fly": "The only way out the ghetto, you know the stereotype Shooting hoops or live on the stereo like top 40".
The reason why they're not programmers is the same reason why I'm not a rapper. Because I'm white AND asian, and I grew up with a computer instead of a boombox, that my friends coded and didn't rhyme. Not that I don't want to, or that I don't work at it, it's closed doors to me.
I'm fairly certain that black people from the neighbourhoods that I get my music from, walking into a coding interview, even if they've been trying to program for years, they'd be just as lost as me walking into a rap battle. It's not about how hard you work at it, or how hard you push at it. Social mobility takes commitment.
Or succinctly put from the same song " What am I to do when every neighborhood is an obstacle"
That really makes me think. 20 years ago Biggie was saying "Either you're slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot." I guess being on Top 40 is an improvement.
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!
I've barely been to any career events at my school, and professors never mention about whiteboard interviews. My friends in CS don't discuss this either. I just learned right away when I did some basic research on job searching.
Bad students or bad schools, it's really surprising either way they can be that bad.