Racial Diversity In Tech By The Numbers | Hacker News Reader

Racial Diversity In Tech By The Numbers

beamjobs.com

16 pointsstephen_greet18 comments

It seems at the same time white employees are under-represented in tech overall (see Racial distribution of tech employees relative to US population).

As a PoC, who the f cares. Fix the root of the issue. Anyone can point at the fruits and say they're bad but that doesn't fix anything.

Ya, I agree it doesn't fix anything. I think that the first step in addressing the issue is to have companies be more open with this data so you can actually track if things are changing for the better. That's my goal with this article.

I think defining "for the better" is the contention, not the existence or visibility of the data. There are people who say that a workforce must be exactly proportionate to the racial makeup of the population. There are people that say no, we need more minorities to be hired to make up for injustice. There are people that say no, it should be purely meritocratic. Resolving this tension is key IMO.

That's a fair point. Personally I've been convinced by research that diversity improves business and financial performance.

Value of diversity in leadership: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our...

Another article: https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-other-diversity-dividend

One word, and I'm not even religious: Amen!

A few more words: this new-found fixation on skin colour (and gender, sexual orientation, gender expression and all those other identities picked up or made up by those who practice intersectionality) really needs to be dropped right now or we - as in what used to be called 'the west' - risk falling back to the way things were in the 60's or earlier, depending on which country you're talking about.

It goes without saying - but needs to be said in the current climate where trigger-happy index fingers try to outdo each other in pointing out -ists and -phobes - that bad policies need to be rejected, bad implementations of good policies need to be corrected, where illegal discrimination is found it needs to be undone and all that jazz. For the rest we - and that means all sides which have been set up against each other - need to drop our verbal tomahawks, look those people on the other side of the barricades in their eyes and tell them we should try to agree on disagreeing on some points but that we mostly share a common goal and should do our best to reach it without getting it each others way too much while getting there. We can take different paths, some of us may be quicker to get there than others and it is up to us all to make sure those who really can't make it on their own are given a helping hand but one thing should be clear from the get-go: if our first step is to identify everyone who is not in our specific and ever-narrowing in-group as enemies the only thing we'll be good at is creating more discontent and chaos.

It's interesting - mentally I break up "Tech" companies into many subdivisions. I think the Tech-Tech portion of a "Tech"company (i.e. SW engineers, chip designers) is probably decently good at being a meritocracy.

If you have a decent track record of being able to code/implement/ship features that are on-spec with few defects, on time, with a decent attitude, its a gross generalization but some company out there will probably hire you - particularly if you have a solid GitHub profile and recs.

And if you don't feel the urge to grow career wise outside of Tech-Tech then you'll be fine although your pay/leadership opportunities will probably reach a ceiling.

But a "Tech" company also consists of Tech-Sales, Tech-Finance, Tech-Law, Tech-Marketing, Tech-VC, Tech-Management, Tech-Product Management, Tech-Management.

All of these other subdivisions that make up the rest of a "Tech" company are actually much more like their counterparts in non-"Tech" companies with all their much more plentiful issues of bias, discrimination and harassment. Perhaps this is because a lot of the work is even less measurable on binary terms and therefore graded based on subjective reviews by existing leadership who as humans that have biases. They are also outward facing where you have to deal with existing biases of society.

>I think the Tech-Tech portion of a "Tech"company (i.e. SW engineers, chip designers) is probably decently good at being a meritocracy.

I don't think that's true at all. Engineers are not some sect of logical beings that don't have human emotions and foibles. I think they're just as likely to be discriminatory as anyone else.

Part of the issue is lack of entry-level positions. When everybody is hiring seniors, you're competing with the same existing pool of talent. You need to grow the talent pool.

Comparing to US population is a bit disingenuous when good tech jobs are not available in most of the country.

Good, now run the numbers for the world... us is a melting pot for the world after all and projects power and currency all over the world. May as well project social justice for all as well.

This is a great but how does everyone put half the worlds population under "Asian"??! Lol.

Well... It's a race right? ;) Personally I think racial divisions are stupid. Cultural divisions are much more exact and useful

..... more than a few races under than 3+ billion no?

Chinese, Nepalese, Indians, Turkics, Armenians, Arabians, Jews, Iranians etc. are all "Asians".

Asian is not a race. What makes you think there's shared genetic lineage between someone born in the north of China and someone born in Nepal? Or in the middle of Indonesia or in Afganistan or in Hokkaido.. etc etc. If we are doing to go by diversity than why not go full hog and analyze genetic variance of your employees and add a loss function that maximizes variance.

Neither is black a race. Black people are the most ethincally diverse "race" At some point we are grouping people based on the way we look or the continent we associate them with, in order to have these conversations,

Tech leadership really means the middle management, i.e. folks hired to manage the line workers. Wait until they find out about the race of most capital owners!

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