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Comment by friendly_chap | Hacker News Reader

So what is the reason that white/indian/asian boys are preferred? Genuinely curious.

I have mostly experience in London and there the landscape is extremely diverse. Why would any company not hire any ethnicity if they are good at what they do?

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Maybe whites/indians/asians aren't "preferred" in the sense of active racial discrimination. But the people currently at the company, being mostly of that ethnicity, may have personal contact lists/rolodecks that are weighted toward that ethnicity. I can attest to that as a Vietnamese-American myself. The vast majority of my childhood friends are white because I grew up in the Midwest. But I had far more Vietnamese friends than would be statistically expected because the few Vietnamese families in the community just hung out regularly even as they integrated with the rest of the town.

If you grew up not just white, but upper-middle class and above, how many black people, statistically speaking, are you regularly in contact with? Versus someone who grows up lower-income or in the inner city? Being relatively well-off, you have a statistically better chance of getting a better K-12 education, which leads to a better chance at a top-tier school, and then to a top-tier company. You eventually are in a position to make recommendations for hires, and statistically speaking, you know more qualified whites than you do blacks and Hispanics. Statistically speaking, at many companies, recommendations from current employers carry a lot of weight.

Over time, this statistical weighting of life experiences would lead to a mostly white/Asian workforce at a tech company. And no one in this process was ever thinking "No blacks".

So to actually get a workforce that includes a representative number of a disenfranchised minority group, you actively have to seek it out. If you are in Silicon Valley, you have to actively make the decision to fly out to Howard U to do recruiting instead of the much more rational and cost-efficient decision to base recruiting at Stanford and Berkeley.

+1. Very eloquently put.

I would probably add that a portion of these are temporary work visa holders (e.g: H-1B). If you get terminated under these visas you are out of status and need to leave the country.

Being on a temporary worker visa makes workers submissive and gives companies leverage over the employee.

Strangely, hiring your friends is seen as corruption when it's for the government, but it's somehow the proper way to do things for the private sector. If companies really do exist to serve potential employees, then we should require them to do that fairly. However, if they're there to provide value for their customers, then maybe it doesn't matter who's friends they hire or what race they or how the discriminate. Nobody has a right to work at Google.

Well, it may be considered corruption also because governments have written and set rules about the hiring process. And giving a friend a boost is likely to violate some of those rules.

I have a personal example of how a friendship helped me get a job. Out of college I didn't get any offers that I liked and was just hanging out at home (fwiw, a luxury that some disenfranchised groups are less likely to have). One of my friends had to decline her summer internship with late notice, but she told the manager to consider me.

I was qualified on paper. Given that it was such late notice, it probably made sense to just fly me in rather than restart the search. The interview went fine, and I was hired.

There is no way I would have gotten that internship if me and my friend weren't friends. Why? Because I'm pretty sure I applied to that company through the normal process and apparently I didn't make the cut. I did not do anything to suddenly become more of a qualified candidate between the time of that rejection and when they decided to give me a call, and yet I ended up with an internship that immediately led to a job and to which I've never really had a problem finding employment in the decade since.

As much as I like myself, I can think of plenty of classmates and friends who were harder-working and more experience and qualifications who had much harder professional paths. And I'm sure there are people who I don't know who are also more qualified than me.

So is my success "fair"? What does that word even mean? What is the most ideal form of "fair" hiring? The "best" candidate? Is there any company or profession in existence in which the definition of "best" doesn't immediately introduce a whole bunch of subjective factors. And if "best" is the priority, then how much is a company obligated to expand the geographical and chronological scope of their search to make absolutely sure they've found the best candidate possible?

I've wondered this. If there are so many talented underpaid people, isn't the right response to form a company that specifically hires from these groups? Should be a whole lot of money to be made.

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Second, why don't these people (apparently) band together? Where are the <underrepresented demographic> founders that hire people that are a cultural fit for them?

I don't get why the blame is put on "silicon valley"; they don't have an obligation to provide work for everyone.

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