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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

That's utter nonsense. The reason blacks and hispanics are not employed in silicon valley is that there are not as many skilled in IT blacks and hispanics as there are from other races in the United States.

Whatever the reasons are, it is a socio-economic problem, it's not a problem caused by any form of systematic discrimination in silicon valley.

I do not believe that I have ever seen any youtube video of a black person complaining about how he is fighting to get a job in silicon valley, but nobody is hiring him, even though he has a great number of projects online and everyone agrees his code is great.

It IS a meritocracy. If you put a bunch of bad black programmers in silicon valley and expect them to learn the tools on the job, then this will be an even greater disservice to the black community - as it would result in a negative stereotype about the quality of 'black programming'.

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We had a similar problem with the magnet schools out east that were ladders for immigrants. It feels like the media pundits would rather attack an apolitical meritocratic institution or corpus for failing to take part in society's broken promises, instead of drawing attention to the real (and boring) cause of the problem.

What's more is that it's damaging in how it proffers the idea up that Si Valley is now some system, some status quo, that people should be obligated to aspire to (or at least is some measure of "success" in the traditional sense).

Whereas getting a good education is something that everyone should aspire to, getting a job in tech?.. That's a personal decision that should come from the heart. Who the heck knows where the tech industry will be in 20 years anyway?

I think the graveness of this difference will become more apparent when you think of possible solutions. One that I offered was that there should be more magnet schools that cater to minorities, that would seem more accessible to them, because honestly, most of these schools are self-fulfilling prophecies anyway.

But what would you do for tech? Set up companies for minorities to go into? Seed funds? What would they invest in? See, I don't think there's really anyone who actually knows where the tech sector is going, so this is going to be difficult to implement.

Yeah, I don't think you can claim discrimination when most of the employees are minorities, just not a certain particular minority group. If you only hired white men, you'd have a hell of a hard time running a software company.

Software (and presumably hardware/software stuff like embedded systems, chip design, etc.) is so amazingly competitive that there would not be room to turn down good programmers. I'd hire a purple-skinned guy who only spoke Elbonian if he was a real hacker, and if that's not your attitude in this industry, you're sunk.

The reason blacks and hispanics are not employed in silicon valley is that there are not as many skilled in IT blacks and hispanics as there are from other races in the United States.

It's a reason, sure.

If it were the reason, the percentage of black and Hispanic employees would be commensurate with the percentage of the "skilled IT" workforce made up by blacks and Hispanics. In addition, the stated decline of employed blacks and Hispanics would indicate a commensurate decline in availability of that skill set amongst blacks and Hispanics.

Vast oversimplification probably isn't useful in this case. It's quite likely that there are confounding factors besides the reason you named.

Indeed, mastery of technology is the last thing that most blacks and Hispanics want to achieve in life. Why is this so is an important question and the answers will, sadly, often point to discrimination. But none of it has anything to do with Sillicon Valley.

Indeed, mastery of technology is the last thing that most blacks and Hispanics want to achieve in life.

Mastery of technology is the last thing that most people want to achieve in life, race irrelevant. What's your point exactly? Come out and say what you want to say.

Feeling pretty insulted by that comment, what life achievement would you recommend us then?

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