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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered why the large tech companies/universities who claim they care so much about diversity don't send their recruiters around the world to track bright, persevering teenagers such as the young man of the article, and bring them into their organization (providing proper mentorship/training in the case of companies). It seems like it would be a fairly cheap way to have a very diverse organization with brilliant people from all over the world.

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How do you know they don't and how do you think would this be achieved for cheap other than recruiting at the best (private) schools of the country?

My anecodatal experience is they don't because I had friends in South Africa, DRC, and Nigeria who came from more privileged middle class backgrounds and still struggled due to a lack of education. They were never recruited by tech firms due to the issues the author faced. One asked me to refer them into some of the firms here but I was unable to get them in.

I don't know if it would have been cheaper to recruit them but I do know they had no chance here in America. They have hustled their way to a living but have worked 10x harder than me because I have an American citizenship and degree.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be possible to graft a form of certification by huge companies on a MOOC curriculum for countries like CAR/CDR/etc. After all big companies do something close in IT (CISCO/Microsoft certifications). Indeed there are some eDx professional certificates but they that are really costly as they are aimed at a western audience.

What about a similar certificate at $100 (one month revenue in Kivu) but in Kinyarwanda (for targeting the right students)?

Why track them? I used to work in a Computation Population biology lab. Three of them have gone to work at Google and or Facebook and they had very diverse backgrounds. The ones that didn't choose the private sector went to Postdoc positions at MIT Lincoln Lab. If you are the place where the money is you can attract talent. This was at a public university and I'm sure you can find similar stories at private ones.

Hopkins is a private school, #1 in "Public health," which is a field of study.

What leads you to believe this would be a cheap process?

The problem is there's really no way to see determine who has the capacity to do what this guy did, until after they do it.

What do you mean by "capacity" here?

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