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Comment by internetman55 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure white people do control a lot of jobs or whatever, but I'm still always confused about people talking about white males in tech or techbros etc. when probably 50-75% of my coworkers (F50 tech company) were Asian (note that whites make up 75% of the population and Asians 5% by the 2010-2015 census data i found on wikipedia)

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71% of programmers in the USA are white. However asians are over represented in the field:

https://datausa.io/profile/soc/151131/

my experiences must be atypical, because at my recent 3 jobs spanning about 11 years, there has been a vast majority of Asian (Indian, Japanese, Chinese, et ) members on our engineering teams.

so whites are underrepresented, and the data supports the idea that racism isn’t a great explanation. interesting

When there are more than two groups, Group X can be overrepresented without Group Y being underrepresented.

That is certainly true, but the numbers this subthread provides are that whites hold a 75% share of the population and a 71% share of programmers.

There's a definite "corporate culture" bias there in your F50 tech company skewing the other direction. How many of that 50-75% are H1b? If not H1b, how "yes man" is your corporate culture? I've worked in large & small orgs on the West coast over the past 20 years, and I tend to notice that people willing to work in large organizations are culturally or personally conditioned to put up with large org B.S. I've seen a significant tendency of Asian workers to take orders and not ask questions, do not try anything outside of what is expected and perscribed. Large orgs thrive on that crap, small to medium orgs it's a sign of something wrong with you if you're not trying to work outside of your box.

Can confirm, my F50 large organization is conformist to a fault. We're super white though, but that reflects the surrounding city (for not-great reasons).

I'm guessing that's anecdotal given the very large range (25% spread) you cite. As a F50 company you might have actual "diversity data" at hand. It'd be interesting to see your actual data.

For example, Intel is #47 and in mid-2017 they were only 801 employees away from full representation.

From their report:

> Full representation means that Intel will be at market availability or higher by 2020 for every employee job category that we track; both technical and non-technical, for women, African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

At the same time, they state that white males and Asians comprise >90% of mid to senior technical roles.

So I take these two facts together to mean that the number of under-represented folks on the market is quite small. Of course you're at 50-75% Asian employee population, because that's representative of the pool you're drawing from.

I figured the stats would be a bit different since the "IT office" I worked at was majority Asian while some other parts of the business and thus overall numbers might be quite a bit different

That's very anecdotal and a narrow sample size at that.

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