Tech Companies Still Aren’t Hiring Black Workers | Hacker News Reader

Tech Companies Still Aren’t Hiring Black Workers

bloomberg.com

48 pointsmozumder100 comments

I'm not originally from America, so I seem to be missing something in articles like this. Why does no one talk about the "pipeline problem," that is, encouraging many more people from "minority" groups (black, women, and so on) to pursue coding from young age? (Edit: or encouraging these groups to enter the field at any age, such as through the community college system/Coursera/etc.)

It seems like examining the end of the funnel (and placing blame squarely on tech companies) is all too easy, and is much easier than addressing a root cause (not enough people of these groups studying CS to begin with.)

Because addressing the pipeline problem means admitting that racism is still alive and embedded in the foundations of our education and work force system.

You can't expect there to be more workers if there's no applicants. There are no applicants because there is a severe lack of Black people (among other groups) represented in Engineering/STEM degree programs. That stems from a lack of good public school education.

But like you said, it generates more clicks-per-article to blame the Big Bad Tech Companies for not being diverse enough, when really we as a national don't honestly want to see marginalized groups succeed. Americans operate by and large on a zero-sum assumption. Many believe that if one group of people succeeds, it somehow will undermine their own success.

> when really we as a national don't honestly want to see marginalized groups succeed

This sounds like a very big statement and probably something that can be a long post in itself. Would you be able to expound on that?

There's a popular theory among the American left that classical liberalism (free speech, freedom of association, "equality of opportunity", etc) is actually an oppressive social structure devised by powerful white men to keep the poor and disenfranchised (minorities and women) from rising through the economic ranks. In the estimation of the American left, the "hands-off" approach of right-wing American politics is actually a "hold them down" approach since no one that is poor or disenfranchised can rise from poverty to wealth on their own. Instead, they favor increased spending on public institutions (like more money for public schools) that will theoretically pull the poor and disenfranchised out of poverty and into the middle or upper classes.

The American right, on the other hand, contends that providing social support to the poor and disenfranchised creates a "victim mentality" and a dependency on the system for advancement. They often accuse the American left of trying to make the United States into a communist nation akin to the Soviet Union and tend to favor the maximization of non-government power as much as possible. In practice, this manifests itself as a sort of "hyper-capitalism" where the American right grants tax breaks to the rich and large corporations in the name of both economic freedom and as a reward for their success in the free market.

It is very hard to reconcile the two perspectives.

EDIT: And just to add my own view here for clarity - I think both the left and right make salient points. The left is correct that there is no equality of opportunity without adjusting for the complexities of other aspects of life and financial constraints of a poor individual's starting position. I think the right is correct that a victim mentality is extremely dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. I think there is a centrist position to be held that works for everyone, but both sides despise centrists, so I am hated every time I talk about politics.

> so I am hated every time I talk about politics.

For what it's worth, I think the U.S. (and the world) could use more centrists!

I think the right is correct that a victim mentality is extremely dangerous and should be avoided at all costs.

This can't go understated. Life is hard and often tragic. Everyone will be a victim of injustice, often grave injustice, at one point in their lives or another. The worst thing a culture can do is demotivate folks to face their tragedies because something about their personal identity (race, gender, geography, religion, etc) made it impossible to overcome.

> when really we as a national don't honestly want to see marginalized groups succeed

How does that explain the success of Asian Americans?

I think that depends on how you measure success.

Strictly in business terms, sure they have more success than other groups, but I don't think (assuming here, no facts) they have over taken White people as the predominant group in leadership roles, high paying positions, or otherwise 'stakeholders'.

If that's not true, feel free to correct.

See [1] and [2]. For example, 2015 median household income for Indian Asians is $100K while the same statistic for white non-hispanics appears to be $63K.

[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-in...

[2] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/visualizations...

They also have much lower crime rates, much higher entrepreneurship, and higher educational attainment.

Skilled immigration is awesome for the US.

This tends to be true for all recent immigrants, 1st and 2nd generation immigrants have much higher acheivement.

I think the other comments here point to the fact that this systemic racism argument doesn't hold up well against actual studies and data. It's an ill defined spectre that vanishes when you look closely.

> over taken White people as the predominant group in leadership roles, high paying positions, or otherwise 'stakeholders'

Is that the bar here? Median household income has always been the bar when talking about the success of racial groups, not the number in leadership roles etc etc. I mean, are we only supposed to be satisfied when 4.8% of all leadership roles are held by Asian Americans? What about their cultural preferences? What about regional populations?

The truth is actual a lot more nuanced. It essentially boils down to a cultural and pipeline problem:

The study:

http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race...

The liberal viewpoint:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...

The conservative viewpoint:

https://www.dailywire.com/news/28473/nyt-claims-groundbreaki...

The counter arguments logic is hard to ignore. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

> Why does no one talk about the "pipeline problem," that is, encouraging many more people from "minority" groups (black, women, and so on) to pursue coding from young age?

This is talked about endlessly. Its a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Merely encouraging is not good enough when people don't have role models who are from the same background as you. Never seeing any black engineers cannot be replaced by 'encouragement' , neither can encouragement replace social inertia.

There was a time when there were no people of Italian descent in positions of success in America. How is it that largely impoverished Italian migrants where able to achieve parity in American society on a level with other groups?

What about people of Asian descent? How have they been able to succeed when at one point in American history they were scorned and shunned?

It's all about culture.

My experience is that most tech companies are falling all over themselves to hire minorities of all kind and the problem is more with high schools steering black students away from stem and just generally segregating black students in general.

I don’t know how much has changed but when I went to a high school that was at least 30% black and I had 1(!) black student in any of my classes in 4 years. Honors and so-called ‘gifted’ programs have often been used as a way to resegregate supposedly integrated schools.

That kind of bullshit has repercussions for generations. You can’t just say ‘oh my bad’ and expect things to turn around on a dime.

> It seems like examining the end of the funnel (and placing blame squarely on tech companies) is all too easy, and is much easier than addressing a root cause (not enough people of these groups studying CS to begin with.)

If you wouldn't blame companies then the problem wouldn't be fixable by the market. Which would go against the religion that true capitalism solves all problems.

The meme that you need to start programming from a young age to be successful is dangerous and needs to die.

I agree and I edited post for clarity.

> Why does no one talk about the "pipeline problem,"

If you go too far, it gets uncomfortable. You have to start asking about genetic, parenting, and culture differences. It's way easier to just implement affirmative action or something similar.

I think the key factor you're missing is that this issue is deeply political and historical. This isn't just a question about what's on the label, ie. black people being hired proportionally, but also about whose fault/responsibility it is to fix. If you say "should we look at other parts of the pipeline?" you're aligning yourself with the political faction of "it's black peoples' problem, not society's." If you advocate for hiring quotas or similar, then you're aligning yourself with the "it's society's problem, not black peoples'"

Of course real solutions to the problem are somewhere in between, and you can argue until you're blue in the face that suggesting looking at other parts of the pipeline is NOT actually saying it's black peoples' problem, but it won't matter. You're in a space where there are powerful political divisions with the entire socioracial history of a large population at sake, and you're going to ruthlessly rounded to either US or THEM.

That's a big part of the reason it's so hard to talk about, and harder still to solve, even before you get to the fact that even without the deep psychological and political baggage it's already a super hard problem.

The short answer is that Google has money and articles like this are about activists trying to get money from Google to fund various programs.

That's certainly a good point--and tech companies are pumping money into teaching minorities to code (check the partners of YesWeCode, WomenWhoCode, BlackGirlsCode, AnitaB, etc.). But you don't have to exclusively treat problems at the root.

I think one of the oft-overlooked ideas behind hiring diversity initiatives and affirmative action policies in general is that creating more role models, leaders, and advocates for minorities does have an impact on making the field more welcome for young minorities.

Everybody talks about the pipeline problem, it's just whatever specific stage of the pipeline you're at it's much easier to shunt responsibility down to an earlier stage.

Having problems hiring black tech workers? It's the college's fault.

Having problems graduating black students with BSs in STEM? It's the high school's fault.

Having problems graduating black students from high school? Really it's the fault of the community/family that raised them.

Having problems fixing the community's culture? Really it's the fault of poverty.

Having problems fixing poverty? Really it's the fact that no good jobs will hire us.

The answer is that everyone plays a role and that includes google. We all like to envision that we're not a part of the 'pipeline', we're exactly where it ends. It never ends, the pipe is your whole life and you never leave it. Seen that way, one pipe connecting to another and another and no one outside ever feeling that it's really their place to intervene is how we get oppression handed down through the generations. There is no 'root' cause because it's a circle, wherever you exist in this pipeline is where you have the power to help solve the problem so let's stop shunting blame down the line.

Cynically Maxine Waters seemed to be engaged in sociopathic manipulation tactics instead of actually trying to solve anything. It looks like a shakedown. Either they give contributions to shut her up or she gets to try to score points by beating on a boogeyman.

Last I heard the AAAs in the tech were leading the pack in minority hiring of all stripes by sector. If it was mostly company culture to blame one would expect most black workers to be concentrated in small businesses or self owned and operated. Not saying that is a solution for discrimination by any means; self starting isn't easy especially when lacking opportunities but that it is a hint as probably pipeline sourced.

I hired about 10 junior dev/qa/pm positions over 3 years as a manager in a SaaS tech company of 50-100.

We posted on every job site and received 1,000+ resumes which I reviewed, in a city with ~30% african american population.

Maybe 3 out of 1,000+ resumes were submitted by african americans, and none met most basic requirements for the position (either a relevant degree, or at least 1 year of related experience, or at least 1 relevant side project).

It's hard to think that I was part of the problem, or could possibly be part of any solution, as the hiring manager.

That is better than what I have seen. Where it was possible to tell I have never seen a black applicant to a programming job. That is as a founder and in previous roles where I helped review resumes and do interviews. We also saw something like (estimating) 50 men to every 1 woman last time we advertised a job.

If there is a problem it is "upstream." I'd be happy to interview black candidates if they existed.

Same. I felt like I was racist and sexist while trying to hire people, based on the results (a team of 90% white males). But it was not a problem I could solve.

We did interview several strong female candidates. One we really wanted but she ended up taking a different job closer to her home. (We're in LA/OC and she would have been forced to take the 55. There is a "one does not simply 'take' the 55" meme about the 55.)

We did not seek any specific racial or gender outcome. We ended up with an all white male team by taking a small sample from a pool of ~75% white male candidates (with the remainder being largely asian males). The odds are strongly in favor of that outcome even if all else is equal.

The only point of me posting to this thread was to agree that this issue is not primarily the fault of hiring managers, or at least it isn't in most cases. Like most social issues I think this one is complex and has multiple causes. For blacks we have: multi-generational impoverishment due to past red-lining and similar policies sabotaging intergenerational wealth accumulation, poor schools in many black neighborhoods, and a culture in the black community that does not prize intellectualism. Obama helped the latter a bit by virtue of his mere existence in such a position.

You could have offered apprenticeships to the black population.

Not his job to do so.

His job is to fill a position, not create a new one and fill it.

Also, the applicants knew they were unqualified and didn't ask for an apprenticeship.

Um, he can offer input. He is the manager of hiring. Open your eyes and stop thinking "I was just doing my job". Get outside the box...

I'm not a teacher, and i'm not running a university, and I have a budget with requirements i've been hired to deliver for clients. How is this even a possibility for me to pursue? I'm not socrates.

I set the job requirements to the absolute minimum of having any relevant anything, including interest, of which there was zero.

He also could have handed out money for nothing, but that's missing the point.

> Maybe 3 out of 1,000+ resumes were submitted by african americans

How do you know? I'm curious because it seems like you'd have to have a spot on the job application for applicants to indicate their race and you'd need to exclude a "prefer not to answer" option in order to be confident about this.

No, but someone's name + linkedin profile (almost always included) tends to give it away 90% of the time. Sometimes you don't know, sure, but usually you do. Just like gender.

We didn't ask, of course.

> How do you know?

Fair point. But even if another of the 297 of 1,000 were in reality black, the OP didn't know and the OP's point about not being part of the problem still stands. Right?

How do you know whether someone was African American based on their resume?

People know. It's a collection of clues, starting by their name

Because every sane person hiring Googles people's names?

Someone's name + linkedin profile (almost always included) tends to give it away 90% of the time. Sometimes you don't know, sure, but usually you do. Just like gender.

We didn't ask, of course.

You looked up 1000+ people on LinkedIn?

Thats literally his job ...

If you look at my picture on Linkedin, you would be able to guess my race. Heck, if you looked at my profile on Github which I actively link to, you would instantly know my race.

Im gonna be the antagonist here and say, black people still aren't getting the degrees required for such work.

Now, ONLY if these tech companies would drop their requirements for university and college, they might see more applicants.

Tech companies should sponsor universities or even create their own. I can see some of the major companies saying "hey, we have this university, which you can attend for FREE only if you work for us for 6 years." Sign up?

Until either black people start taking more classes for tech work, OR tech companies start a university theirself, I don't see this happening anytime soon.

I work with 80% foreigners. 20% Americans. Its only because the Americans aren't going into Tech. Sad, but true.

My manager once told me that when a position is open, majority of applicants are either Chinese or Indians.

Heatmap? There are more of them.

> Tech companies should sponsor universities or even create their own. I can see some of the major companies saying "hey, we have this university, which you can attend for FREE only if you work for us for 6 years." Sign up?

Who do you think would the tech companies recruit for these positions? I think you just described a large scholarship with strings attached. I don't think a company would be willing to foot the bill unless they think the investment is really going to pay off for them.

Thats cool. Lets start with apprenticeships and see where it goes. OR sponsor a black kid for the coding boot camps. Hey, attend this 6-month boot camp on us and work for us for 3 years. for Free.

Such programs exist already. The SMART program for instance, which links college scholarship to a job. Companies do it all the time.

They do it for black kids? Do they go into the inner cities and ask around?

Lets talk money instead of 'race' e.g. the Latino problem is similar, so money is probably the more important factor. Other programs like QuestBridge work hard to recruit folks who are underrepresented, either by family income or kids who are first in their family to attend college.

Um, the article explicitly describes race. Just staying on topic.

SMART is open to everyone. You can simply apply online.

Does the number of black workers that have the technical knowledge/experience account for more than 2-3% of the total pool of hirable workers? Or do black workers only account for 2-3% of tech employees because that's the number that knows how to code?

It’s less than that in a lot of places. It’s a massive societal problem and it needs to be fixed from elementary schools up.

Oh wow, that chart titled ‘Little Has Changed’ with the X axis pushed out to 100%.

Looks like, if you squint hard enough, Facebook has at least tripled their number of black coders.

If you scroll over, it shows that the share increased from 1% to 3% from 2014 to 2017. And the total number of employees has almost certainly gone up in that same time frame.

So their fastest growing demographic then!

The entire premise of the article is false. The article states that "tech companies aren't hiring black workers."

The truth is that black workers aren't applying to tech companies. In the last decade I have never once had a black person interview with me, not a single time. Yet, the black person who is on my team (hired before I joined this team) is one of the most skilled and knowledgeable people I know. He is rewarded for his knowledge and work.

Articles like this are poisonous.

I don’t think this applies to dark-skinned Indians, so it must be more than simply skin color.

He said the party reminded him of a scene in the film, “Get Out.’’ Like the movie, the new employees looked like props that were conveniently staged to showcase a more welcoming environment than he felt actually existed.

It's amazing to behold how absolutely toxic tech journalism and our industry is becoming. Divisive clickbait full of finger pointing, anecdotal evidence and a clear steerage away from causation... yet sitting pretty on the front page of Hacker News. What a shame.

I have noticed a similar trend at engineering campuses. So universities aren't recruiting black students?

Why would people of color take engineering courses if there aren't any jobs for them afterwards?

BUT there are. I read a fact recently that stated something like the USA, has 40k NEW Tech jobs per year and we are only graduating 10k... There is plenty of work for everyone.

I hope you're trolling.

Agree with nomy99. I work on a college campus. There was 1 African American in our CS graduate school. He was hired by Google before he even graduated. Out of several hundred undergrads, the number of "other" students is statistically zero. The college is actively recruiting any and all qualified students regardless of race. People like google and the mom & pop store down the street are legally to not discriminate based on race. How do we get African Americans to enter STEM fields? I honestly don't think your average African American student who wants to learn computer science is thinking "I am never going to get hired". Am I wrong?

Tech companies are being actively leaned on to lower their standards to hire more black workers. Saying there aren’t jobs for them is nonsense.

"lower their standards to hire more black workers." do you hear yourself? You have linked color with standard. Companies hire based on skill, experience and culture fit.

It is known fact that a lot of tech companies hire to fill a "quota". OP is actually right, unfortunately.

Let’s assume (correctly imo) that every subgroup (race, gender, origin, sexuality, etc.) is equally skilled. If you apply a technical standard equally, you end up with a market distribution of hires.

Companies are being leaned on to over represent certain groups relative to their market distribution. That’s not possible industry wide unless you lower your technical standards for that subgroup.

Industry wide, you are right but top companies do not have to lower their standards, just invest more in finding qualified candidates. You will end up with an industry where the top players have diverse campuses, and small shops are made up of whichever ethnic group is locally available.

First of all, in the technical field you can not lower standards by much. A person either has a degree or necessary experience or they don't. The fact that they are underrepresented is because the talent isn't there.

Now, OP's statement, no matter how much justified it is logically is propagating a nasty stigma associated with black workers -- that they are here to meet a quota or are less intelligent and experienced.

I try to avoid conversations like this rather than engage directly because I'm likely to question results until things are more proven. However, I'm seeing things like this more often and want to become more informed.

When looking at the percentage population of Americans with bachelor's degree (general req for software company), should we see a reflection of that pool in tech companies? I found some census information which shows that the pool of black or African American workers might only be about 5% compared to white. Should the industry reflect this or do we somehow expect to have an unnaturally high diversity?

Someone else pointed out here, but putting the chart at 100% makes me feel like this is a piece for views and not information. It doesn't make sense when showing relative improvement.

https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr10-19.pdf

5% isn't great, but it's still higher than the 2-3% actually employed by these companies, suggesting improvement is possible.

I think one major problem that's in the companies' power to solve is that they don't have offices where black people live (e.g. Atlanta). Coming to work for these companies means being isolated from the black community both at and outside of work.

Being black is correlation not causation just like being a woman. This nonsense has to stop

And as usual with these articles it's always the fault of the evil universites and terrible companies while the people in question are always devoid of any responsibility of getting the right education, having initiative and obtaining the right skills needed for the job.

If tech companies hire globally, shouldn't their racial demographics mirror the world demographic stats?

In my 15+ years of experience in SV, majority of my colleagues were from Asia, which accounts for 60% of world population. Rest were evenly divided between Europe and North America, and some very tiny fraction coming from Africa and South America. In that case, isn't it expected that blacks[1] would account for 1-3% of workforce, since USA itself accounted for 10-15% of the workforce? If Democrats are open to immigration, then a consequence of that is going to be an under representation of blacks and Latinos.

[1] black is hard to define in many places. Eg. Who is "black" in Asia?

This problem starts from early childhood and is reflective of the utter failure of public schools in lower income districts.

For too long we have used the band-aid of lowering standards and affirmative action at every stage after, in college and hiring, to kick the can down the road and the result has been quite the opposite, leading to more bias and resentment.

If you are a highly skilled engineer and black, you have to constantly deal with the stigma that maybe you got to where you are not based on your outstanding abilities but only to fill some arbitrary racial quota.

There is nothing worse than that for ruining someone's self-esteem.

Most of us here support and appreciate diversity. The lack of diversity in tech companies represents a lost opportunity. It's not just black people, but women as well. The mono-cultures can encourage some troubling attitudes and restricts creative multi-cultural ideas.

Forcing companies to maintain racial/gender quotas is not the solution. I'm not sure what the solution is. The causes for the situation are multifaceted, a reflection of our country.

For all of those who claim it might be a pipeline problem, I looked it up and it looks like 4% of engineering degrees are granted (earned? Awarded?) to African Americans

https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/aamajors.c...

Ill leave the interpretation up to you

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

I am sure those pointing out a pipeline problem are claiming it begins before college and those engineering degrees would be granted.

Or were you supporting the pipeline theory by showing how few candidates there actually are?

Well, the question is: how much of the problem is explained by the "pipeline" theory.

If a company hires x%, and there are y% graduates, then we have a pipeline problem if x=y, or is close to y.

If x is much smaller than y, then the pipeline doesn't explain the whole problem.

I am not taking a stance on the pipeline issue in the general case. It may or may not be a problem for particular companies on a case by case basis.

but isn't this inline with the original article?

> Blacks made up 7 percent of U.S. high-tech workforce, and just 3 percent of the total Silicon Valley workforce.

4% of the degrees are granted to members of the AA community, 3% of the jobs in SV are given to them.

i guess SV companies recruit from the top graduates. it would be interesting to know the percentage of AA of say the top 10% graduates in the STEM fields.

as others have pointed out, this doesn't mean that things are OK. it just shifts the focus from the hiring companies to the education system

Yes, so your line of questioning is the one I would follow.

I agree the next question is what is the percentage of AA grads from top schools where they recruit before one makes a call on the prevalence of the pipeline problem.

Geographic distribution is important. Many don't live, and don't want to live, in SV. I'm not quite sure why you are using SV as the gold standard, since there are many that want nothing to do with SV.

Uber took some initiatives to address this issue.

https://www.uber.com/en-MX/diversity/uberhue

https://eng.uber.com/uncovering-genius

I'm willing to accept there is racism in the tech industry, but I'm not willing to accept that it is the ONLY variable keeping black folks from tech jobs.

This problem needs a real, statistical, multivariate study. Any publication casting judgement on the tech industry while remaining unwilling to pony up the dough for such a study should be properly criticized for playing the race card and inventing false narratives to gain readership.

Telling me there aren't many black folks in tech is not enough. I need a data-driven explanation of WHY before I accept it's mostly racism, or it's mostly a pipeline problem, or it's mostly a primary education problem, or it's mostly a cultural problem, or it's not a problem at all because black folks don't want tech jobs in the first place.

Please forgive me if I am missing something here. Is a company to make a chart of color distribution of their employees and base their hiring on that? There has to be a better way to figure out if a company is hiring based on skill or not than just this.

In Poland where I happen to live there are almost no black people at all, I'd guesstimate it's much less than 0,1% of the whole population but we have similar problem with women in tech.

There is only one solution in my opinion - ignore the problem at all, because there is no "problem".

If you're a good candidate no one here will question your beliefs, skin colour or sex.

Focusing on the issue on the other hand creates bunch of other, in my opinion more serious threats - I've been recruiting for a medium* Polish startup a few years ago and one day our CEO decided there is not enough "diversity" so HRs started recruiting women left and right.

Long story short, for 8 out of 10 positions we'd have two or three resumes from very strong male candidates and tens of resumes from much less experienced females. Within 3 years we hired so many women the men became the minority, about 6 months after that the place went bankrupt and everyone ended up jobless.

*medium in this world means up to 40 folks

TL;DR every sane company hires the best workforce they could afford. If there are not enough people of colour it's usually problem with these people, not the employer.

Someone recently had tweeted the concentration of Black population in the US. Tech companies are no where in those concentrated areas.

Porbably a way for Tech companies to build diverse teams, is to setup research facilities and programs that encourage better pipelines, in states with higher black population (not SF, LA, NYC/Austin)

well, how dare they!?!?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com