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Comment by ingsoc79 | Hacker News Reader

One look at the website of Seattle's Garfield High School (34% black/latino) CS Club website pretty much sums it up: http://www.garfieldcs.com/

The makeup is similar at the college level: sitting in on CS courses at UW you see a sea of white, east asian, and south asian faces. I can count the number of black or latino students (out of the several hundred enrolled students I saw) on two hands.

It's a pipeline problem, full stop.

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And corporate diversity goals are based on the pipeline, not the general population. Lots of folks in this conversation seem to be making utterly incorrect assumptions about programs that they seem to have deep contempt for. Unsurprising.

Well, right. Corporations internally work towards their diversity goals, which are sensibly based on the pipeline and aim to eliminate bias in hiring. That's why they don't want to publicize their numbers; they know people like the Bloomberg reporter who wrote this article will incorrectly try to measure their efforts against the total number of minorities in the US.

The hiring pipeline is discussed explicitly in the article, and comparison to national demographics is legitimate.

Comparing hiring to national demographics is not legitimate. You should compare hiring to national graduates with CS degrees, controlling for institution. That will tell you if there is discrimination in the hiring step. If you want to see if there is discrimination in entrance to CS programs, you go a step earlier, etc. And you keep walking back until you find the source of the discrepancy. Where do women get off the CS pipeline? Is it at the hiring filter? The college major filter? Somewhere in high school? Even earlier? It's disingenuous to place the blame for the entire pipeline at the feet of the entities at the very end. Somewhere there is a bias, but it isn't necessarily at the corporate level.

It's certainly true that some minorities are underrepresented in tech. A lot of the irritation you're seeing comes from the repeated accusations and implications that this is due to some unspoken policy of discrimination at tech companies.

Companies can and should make an effort to ensure they're hiring a diverse range of people. However, it needs to be done with the bigger picture in mind - otherwise it becomes a defacto quota system.

So policies that result in under-representation of POC are neutral, but changing hiring & retention practices to improve diversity is a defacto quota system?

If it is literally a quota system...then yes, it is a quota system.

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