Hacker News Reader

Comment by theoneill | Hacker News Reader

Why is it bad that they're white?

Obviously it's not bad in and of itself, it's just an additional layer of homogeneity that a prospective teammate will consider before applying.

The 90+ hour workweeks are already a big red flag to anyone with a spouse and/or children. It's hard to get along at work when everyone else is comfortable contributing in ways that you can't match directly. No one wants to be the odd man out in a high pressure work environment.

Edit: Fwiw I am also a white 20something male! I have always worked in relatively diverse environments and I have enjoyed it and would look for the same in my next employer.

I have always worked in relatively diverse environments and I have enjoyed it and would look for the same in my next employer.

My current company had no diversity until I joined (the founder and employee #1 even went to the same school), but it never struck me as being worth thinking about. I'm honestly curious, what benefits do you get from a company with ethnic diversity?

Racial and ethnic diversity really seem like non issues...they are pretty superficial differences within a work environment. Age, children, and sex are a little more relevant, and even those are pretty minor and only loosely correlated with traits relevant in a work environment.

Bringing a windows guy into a unix shop, or hiring a sales guy too early at a product development stage startup, or hiring a stupid or lazy person would be real diversity of a bad kind. Good diversity is bringing in people with domain expertise outside your core specialty, like having a font and calligraphy aficionado on your os team.

Superficial diversity is really overvalued.

I've often found cliquishness when there's, say, five people, of which four are from the same age/sex/ethnic/cultural/etc. background, and the fifth is from something different. It's worse when the four are from a quite narrow background of similarity, like four guys of the same age/race/major/etc. from Stanford, or four immigrants from the same country.

If you put it that way I sort of agree, although I think Americanized ethnicity or race is much less dominant as a trait than other traits.

Racial and ethnic diversity really seem like non issues...they are pretty superficial differences within a work environment.

Superficial diversity is really overvalued.

And very undervalued by people in the majority ...

For the past 12 years I have often been either the only American in a group, or the only white guy, or the only person who went to a top-tier tech school. I've been in groups that have been totally multicultural, or groups where one other ethnicity or race predominated. (admittedly, everything has been at most 30% female).

I really haven't observed ethnicity or race as a primary factor in team dynamics. Even first language, assuming people have a minimal level of fluency, hasn't been a major factor; even with my minimal French, I've ended up hanging out with French video gamers and sci fi fans (all 3 of them at a big base; they spoke maybe 100 words of English) vs. a bunch of other Americans.

Volitional things like the kind of music you like, the job you do, your hobbies, etc. are really a much bigger factor, at least in my limited experience, than race or ethnicity.

In an 100 person office, racial and sexual homogeneity would be creepy.

In a 3 person office, who cares?

It's not bad that they're white - it's bad if they're three identical clones.

And their race is supposed to predict this? I've heard white people can actually be quite different from one another.

If it's one item in a long list it seems reasonable to take it as one factor, especially if they're, in the case I've encountered most often, twentysomething male nonimmigrant whites who grew up in an urban area in the northeast or west coast, in a middle-class or better family. Any one of those factors aren't particularly predictive, but taken as a whole they narrow down a culture with some accuracy.

In a long enough list, by definition it's reasonable.

The problem is, this was a short list.

No, the problem is that in a list of eleven points, you pick one to make a fuss about - alledging that the original poster said them being white was a bad thing.

It was in a list including "two degrees" (good) and "burned out twice in 6 months" (bad). Why do you take away that he said white is bad?

Why do you have an issue with skin colour being mentioned, but not age or gender or which college the degrees were from or how many hours they work or which specific tech they use? Why are you pushing so hard to make a great big racial controversy out it?

The list _delirium and I are referring to is this one of 4 items:

    All three appear to be single white 20something males

I am in fact pretty nearly as bothered by the claim that it's a problem that all 3 are male, or in their 20s.

It's lame when someone writes off a group of people based on such superficial characteristics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com