Comment by brandmeyer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brandmeyer | Hacker News Reader

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> If anything Google needs more different minorities if anything, for instance Latinos and Blacks.

This is a much bigger problem than just the software industry in the US. I'm a Navy veteran, as a nuclear reactor plant mechanic. I remember being shocked in MEPS (the enlistment and entry processing center for all branches of the armed forces) by the number of black men enlisting in the Army and Marine infantry - it's much higher than the local population would suggest. But of the roughly thousand or so people I worked with as Nukes in the Navy, I can recall only one black man. The trend is just as strong in college. While I'm working as a software engineer today, my degree isn't in CS: its in Mechanical Engineering. The same trend applies there, too. I've worked with a grand total of one black engineer professionally, and he was an intern! There is a serious problem in this country with our failure to attract black and latino talent to engineering. Its pretty frustrating to see all the media attention focused on bringing women into CS, while almost zero attention is being focused on the lack of black and latino engineers.

I can't point to any single factor that is driving this trend. But it must happen in High School or earlier, since it's already totally broken by the time folks are graduating HS.

Engineering, from my recollections, had probably the highest wash-out rates of any major when I was in college. It sure looks like a huge part of that is because of the math requirements - a lot of engineering programs throw you in the deep end right at the beginning, with calculus and differential equations, and then you're pretty much hosed in the subsequent coursework if that doesn't click, or you come in woefully unprepared. And overwhelmingly, high schools do a piss-poor job of teaching mathematics to a level that would prepare someone to hit the ground running well enough to survive the initial stages of an engineering major and get through to the interesting stuff. AP Calculus students from top high schools struggle mightily with it, Flying Spaghetti Monster help you if you never mastered, or even were exposed to those concepts at weaker schools.

Computer science isn't much different. All the math coursework hazing is why I have a history degree and a minor in CS - the minor let you take all the interesting stuff, without the 4-5 semesters of poorly taught, mostly useless math department coursework.

> engineering programs throw you in the deep end right at the beginning

I started as a EE. My diff EQ professor literally did the stunt "look to your left, look to your right, of the three of you, only one will pass my class." I was the only caucasian to pass, but I made a D, and rather than re-take the class I decided that EE wasn't for me.

There was only one way to ace that class, and that's to live inside it. I have a very good mind for math, but I was also interested in lots of other things: music, theater, philosophy, humanities, business, politics. The same semester I had made a D in Diff EQ I had also taken a Phil 101 (Logic) class which I aced. I was also a walk-on in a play that semester.

The dean of the engineering school called me to his office to tell me I wasn't the sort of student the EE program was looking for. I left and got an MIS degree, where I could develop as a much more rounded student.

Looking back some 30 years later, I realize now that the dean was literally telling me that they don't want well-rounded EE students. He was literally telling me, in spite of being in the top 1/3 of my class (math-wise) the very fact that I wasn't willing to forgo Logic and my theater activities to become a better calculus student made me a misfit. The whole point of making Diff EQ so amazingly difficult was specifically to weed out those who did anything but study Diff EQ.

So in the end, I made the right decision for myself and my career. And I've learned a healthy suspicion of companies that tend to exclusively hire ace engineering students.

Eh, those math and science Computer Science required classes I haven't found to be too useful after getting my degree (exception: discrete math and linear algebra). It was definitely a struggle to get through them, though, and I found math and science to be easy in high school, so I probably wasn't as well prepared.

But even though I breezed through it in high school, my classmates didn't, even the AP courses. So I'm not sure how much that could be ramped up. I do think at least discrete math could be taught earlier, though.

America is not an equal system, money matters. It's a vicious cycle. If you're looking for one factor, I think it's dollars and cents.

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