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Comment by djtriptych | Hacker News Reader

is it even true that most software engineers are white and male? We're discarding indian and chinese engineers?

My experience over about 30 years is that 90% of engineers I’ve seen, including applicants, are male and 60% are Asian. I’d estimate I’ve encountered about 5,000 engineers. I wasn’t tallying so this includes whatever bias I have as a North American tech worker.

But most engineers are not white as far as I’ve experienced.

You don't even have to guess, BLS exposes this data to the public, search for "software developer": https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

Interesting, it says 36% of software developers are Asian but only 9% of web developers.

That table gives “or” statistics. You can get the percent males (80%) and the percent whites (55%) but you can’t get the percentage of white males.

In fact given that 45% are not white, if only 6% of software developers are white women that would put white men in the minority.

Great point! In addition, race and ethnicity are different dimensions, so with 6% of developers as Hispanic/Latino, if you're interested in the white non-Hispanic population, that's probably around 52% given about half of Hispanics identify as white.

That is the US only though

In which country? It's true in France, it's possibly not true in the US, it's definitely not true in China.

In a recent US job opening for entry level SWE, over 80% of applicants had CS/IT degrees from the Indian subcontinent. /anecdote

Those are "white-adjacent". They're the glitch in the woke matrix.

They're minorities, non-white, yet they perform. Outperform even. This suggests that merit works no matter your background which breaks identity politics.

Hence, successful minorities project "whiteness". This includes awful behavior like punctuality and rationalism.

Certainly not in my Silicon Valley teams.

I'd say maybe 40% white (half of which are immigrants) and 80% male.

More diverse than any leftist activist group I've seen.

Interesting tidbit, but was the political snark at the end really necessary?

Not much is necessary, but it felt on topic because it's arguing against leftist fantasies that SW engineers are all straight white males.

One thing's for sure though, nobody in tech really cares about your race or sexual orientation, they care about your results.

Sure there might be some bias against/for some groups, but everyone knows there's genuses in India and white caucasian flops so they give everyone equal opportunity.

Only exception is for like legal reasons it might be easier to hire some French random low-tier programming over a Russian/Irani genius but that's due to sanctions, but if those same Russian/Irani guys held a western european passport they would gladly just hire them outright.

Source: Venezuelan (sanctions) who is also a holder of a European passport (all sorts of doors just open just because I hold this 2nd nationality out of sheer luck, and you know Venezuelans aren't extremist either).

If your first sentence is true, pretty sure we will not be having a Gemini this woke.

If we care about the results, and the model showed an Asian and Black Nazi, then we know it is not really about the results.

Eh, that isn't quite true because determining the quality of the "result" is biased by our opinion of its author and, equally important, how they present their results. Race and sexual orientation impact your speech patterns and habits which you very much are judged on.

Additionally, when a woman works with a man on something often the woman's contribution is assumed to be less than the man's contribution if they're listed as co-authors - I would be very surprised if this weren't the case beyond academia but also in artifacts like design docs.

how many leftist activist groups have you seen?

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