How To Be A Successful (African) American in Silicon Valley
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
"Heard Yeezy was racist, well, I guess that’s on one basis, I only like green faces."
I guess I'm like Kanye then: I'm green-biased, because in the end, that's the only thing that matter - profits :-)
"Underrepresentation does not equal racism" is also a great idea to cite - who cares about one's representation?
Profits are what matters. Is there a white resentment about having too few white players in the NBA? As long as they are good and get well paid, who cares?
But it's not a contradiction: I have seen nothing to lead me to believe that a talented player of any race will not get a fair chance in the NBA. It's all about winning, but the opportunity is there for everyone.
So isn't SV all about winning too? Yes, it is—but we know a lot less about what leads to winning. There are no draft combines where everyone gets show what they can do. Nobody writes code competitively directly against other programmers on TV to prove they can produce at a high level. Companies play it by ear. The NBA knows how to evaluate talent. We don't.
Here's a fun example: "PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. No PayPal people would ever have used the world “hoops.” Probably no one even knew how to play “hoops.” Basketball would be bad enough. But “hoops?” That guy clearly wouldn’t have fit in. He’d have had to explain to the team why he was going to go play hoops on a Thursday night. And no one would have understood him."[2]
Welp, guess I wouldn't have been able to get hired at PayPal. Not only do I like to play basketball, I've said "shooting hoops" a lot. You're going to turn down someone who aced your tests because of a hobby and the phrase he used to describe it? You really think that's the secret to success? You're flying by the seat of your pants in a world without good metrics and you don't know which things you did contributed to your success and which things didn't. You're actively discouraging diversity of culture (which is not directly the same thing as diversity of gender/race, but it makes it a lot harder to have the latter).
And it's that still-sometimes-present active discouragement of diversity that I find frustrating about many parts of the programmer community.
[1] a basketball league venture in the southern US that required players be white, that I believe folded quickly a couple of years ago
[2] http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels...
I can't say anything about paypal - I wasn't there, and I don't like to pass judgements.
But if they indeed were that dumb not to hire a good candidate only for the sports he plays, it's no wonder their product sucks more an more. Personally, I'm eagerly waiting for a competitor until bitcoin gets more momentum.
BTW one thing I'd like to say - the opportunity in coding is there for everyone - it's even more open than the NBA because the judge is the market, and with the current technology everyone can easily start a tech company and compete globally.
It's a pure and perfect competition.
There's no need to be hired be a company - you create your company and show your product to the market. If it works, if it does what people need, you will get money.
Interesting, I have the exact opposite viewpoint - I can see the result of a software project, but I have very little insight into the contributions behind the scenes. In sports, I (and the rest of the world) can see the contributions of the atheltes and judge merit for ourselves.
For example, I know the new iOS maps have problems, but (aside from press leaks) I don't have a lot of insight into who did what. On the other hand, I know from watching Knicks games last season that Jeremy Lin was the real deal. I know the result of the 2012 Super Bowl (Giants beat Patriots) and I also saw the contribution of the team members (for example, Tom Brady throwing a perfect pass to Wes Welker at he end of the game that Welker dropped).
I've always see athletics as the closest ideal to a meritocracy that we have in our society.
But still +1'ing for this very interesting opinion - because you're right, in a company which more than 1 employee it's hard to judge the individual performance.
A ball may be less expansive than a computer, but a free access to a public library and following online programming courses is even less expansive.
IMHO, the only real difference is peer acceptance of an investment in sport, which still ranks much higher (socially) than investing time in computers and learning.
When we lost the class of computers that the C64, Vic 20, Atari 400/800, TI99/4A, and Sinclairs made up, we lost a lot of the onramp to programming.
So at the very beginning anyone has a chance. But once you have some responsibilities white males still have a lot of opportunity to make their own business and other groups may not.
Somebody else can also go ahead and presume that in a company that is in the business of converting human capital into money, diversity of culture can bring new perspectives and ideas that may lead to higher performance. In the absence of proof to the contrary, they'd be taking their own biases for granted as well.
In the end, I'm not particularly impressed by the idea that company culture trumps the ability to perform the job in an exemplary fashion. As a long-time manager, I pride myself on getting results from people who have the necessary baseline skills to perform. In my former life as a Director of Development, I can't imagine saying to the President, "Sorry, but the reason we're slipping deadlines is that we can't hire enough qualified people. And thanks for that referral, but although he aced everything technically, he's a basketball player rather than a cyclist or rock climber, and worse, he used a word typical of basketball players. So that's why we're going to lose some money this quarter."
I don't play golf, but if you do and you're amazing, you're hired and one day you may be managing me and dropping hints that I ought to hit a few buckets of balls on the range. I'm ok with that :-)
You're actively discouraging diversity of culture (which is not directly the same thing as diversity of gender/race, but it makes it a lot harder to have the latter).
My point is just that it's not at all clear that encouraging uniformity of culture is automatically a terrible, productivity-destroying bias, and that I have worked at places which strongly preferred that candidates "fit into" the organization's culture while at the same time being strongly committed to diversity in gender, race/ethnicity, and so on. These are definitely separable.
[1] If someone didn't have as much technical background or interest in the job itself, that's one thing, but when it comes to liking to go hiking vs liking to play board games? Is it really going to make a difference?
It does not 'equal' racism, but then again I don't want to even use the word "racism" in a discussion unless I'm 100% confident everybody agrees on the definition. All too often in discussions like this, I encounter people who have their own pet definitions for the meaning of words like "equality" and "freedom" and "racism/racist."
Now I'm guessing you are posting a rhetorical question, but I'll answer it as if you have an open mind and want to hear from people with a diversity of viewpoints. I don't measure results by representation, but I care deeply about removing obstacles to equal representation
> Profits are what matters
To you. Not to me. Or at least, not more than equality of opportunity.
The words "prejudice" and "bias," however, are not nearly as emotionally charged, and it's possible to interrogate the situation more rationally.
He gives the example of Arrington not knowing any black entrepreneurs. I highly doubt it's because he's a member of the KKK. However, it's extremely possible that he has unconscious biases that make it less likely he will meet or remember black entrepreneurs.
If you accept that hypothesis for a moment, you can start brainstorming solutions. But if you just say he's a racist, the only solution is to stop hating people of color. What?!
I wish that were true.
Depending on the costs to removing such obstacles (if there are any), I might agree (ie if it's cheap enough), but even then I have my doubts about mandatory equality and the danger it represent for efficiency.
Humans being are a different bunch, with their own interest and abilities. I don't want to have "equal representation" in something I suck at/don't care about, because it would bring less efficiency.
I guess if you follow your idea, you start campaigning for the size of NBA players to reflect the natural gaussian of the population - and then their weight too.
But 5' 200 lbs players might be less efficient and make the matches less interesting.
> > Profits are what matters
> To you. Not to me. Or at least, not more than equality of opportunity.
Then we have differing opinions. Equal opportunities exist. Equal representation is a slippery slope. It will damage efficiency and profits.
It is a tricky subject to be sure, and I too would be nervous about how to actually deal with this problem instead of doing "feel good" work (i.e. "nothing is fixed but we feel that we're doing something!").
I guess my take would be that small businesses be exempt from most rules as they're too small to make a huge impact anyway and are not very likely to ever get very big. Large companies, on the other hand aren't efficient anyway so it's fine to impose all sorts of things on them while trying to address the very real inequality problems.
No, opportunity is what matters. "Underrepresentation does not equal racism" is true but it may (and I stress "may") be an indicator of disparate impact, and so underrepresentation shouldn't be dismissed.
Paul Judge worked his way to the top, and I'm happy for him. That doesn't mean that the only reason other folks haven't (of any race/gender/background) is because they didn't work hard enough.
On the flipside, it's pretty hard for Latin American, African American, and Asian Americans to be full-time actors as most American shows/movies cast Caucasian Americans. Doesn't matter how good an actor the individual is if they are excluded purely because of their race.
It's not just racism - more like a weird expectation that's hard to understand. I remember reading something (about Rhianna IIRC) not being black enough to portrait some civil rights leader.
WTF??? We live in a diverse society. I couldn't care less whether the actor of ethnicity A should be supposed to play a character I know or suppose to be of ethnicity B - as long as he's good, who cares?
It might even make a better story (ex: Romeo must Die vs Romeo & Juliet)
This is like saying is there black resentment for lower graduation or employment rates. There's quite a bit of evidence that the stereotype that white men can't play basketball significantly reduces ther chance at succeeding at the professional level. If the resentment is there, it manifests itself at a subconscious level that no one, not even the "victim" is aware of.
There's also the issue that male-female disparities are generally more tractable problems. One of the saving graces of gender inequality is that it's not deeply tied in with socioeconomic class.
I don't have as much self-interest in whether people from Ohio, Eskimos, or women are proportionally represented. (I sort of care in an abstract way, because tech jobs are great and a good way to live a happy life, but if there were some innate reason why gingers were comparatively far better at medicine than at tech, I wouldn't cry that there were few gingers in tech.)
The nice thing about capitalism is that even with my own self-interested motivation, it tends to solve problems like this.
It really doesn't, for two reasons. 1) the rational actor model is a bad abstraction, and irrational prejudice can be an important factor; 2) there are various "bootstrap" problems in any given field that can keep unbalanced equillibria even in situations where discriminatory forces aren't actively pushing things towards those equillibria.
Women in tech is actually a striking example of this phenomenon. If you look at "qualified" in terms of something measurable like Math SAT scores above 600 (typical for a decent engineering program), women are dramatically underrepresented relative to their qualifications.
You would think there would be strong pressures to get more women into the field, given the ostensible shortage of engineers, but companies make no such attempts (partly because the self-selection happens long before they can really influence things, and partly because of "boostrap" issues).
I think "med school leads to a great career" was a major factor.
Among people hiring, it's pretty common to actively search out new sources of candidates -- "Australia", x new education program, prior military service hires, etc.
I agree the early stage problems need to be solved by someone other than those hiring in the short term, but it's absolutely the case that a qualified (female, black, whatever) candidate will get a fair shot at many (most?) companies today. In large organizations, there is still some pressure to hire those candidates preferentially, and even in a small startup, hiring female technical employees early is preferred because it makes it a lot easier to hire even 20-30% female employees later, vs. an all-male 20 person company trying to hire its first female technical employee. (Sorry, but I don't count employees as a single class -- if 100% of your engineers are male and you have a female office manager, that's not really the same thing as a company like Quora where the first hire was a great designer and front-end developer who happened to be both from Facebook and female.)
So, hopefully solving the "demand side" also helps people solve the "supply side".
That said, MIT is way ahead of the industry on this. Only 18% of engineering graduates last year were women. This is despite the fact that about 45% of all high school seniors who score 600+ on the SAT Math, and 40% of all high school seniors who score 700+ on the SAT Math, are girls. Even at the perfect 800 level, it's 33% girls.
And this isn't directed at you, but whenever I see "aptitude" in these discussions I get skeptical. A lot of people don't agree with the findings in the "Bell Curve", but even if we take those results to be completely true, the fact of the matter is that the differences don't really matter that much in the range we're talking about. It's an explanation for why there are so many fewer female Einsteins, not why there are so many fewer female Cisco engineers.
And it's not even the math and tedium. I was pretty shocked to find that half of Big-4 accountants are women. About 30% of one major Big-4 firm's partners are women. These numbers blow away anything you see in engineering, in a field that is arguably much more numerically-intensive and boring.
The fact is that the other professions are leaving engineering in the dust when it comes to making representation in the field equal to aptitude. Accounting firms and law firms are dealing with the next issue--which is how to have a strong representation of female partners while dealing with the fact that the partnership push coincides with women's prime reproductive years. And they're making progress on that issue. Engineering is in the rearview mirror, hanging with the neanderthals in banking.
If you did take Bell Curve as completely true (which is a very lively debate), a shifted normal distribution would substantially change the makeup of a career field (otherwise equally distributed) picked from those with IQ>130 or something. It probably is fair to say Cisco engineers are smarter than the US average, although probably less so than top startup founders. In real life hiring is not on a single metric, of course, particularly later in one's career. But, a one+ SD shift would lead to really different populations at 115, 130, 160 IQ, in addition to absurd outliers like Einstein. (Plus, there's plenty to call into question IQ and specific measures of IQ, like Feynmann's relatively average score. I personally think it's far more predictive in the ~50-115 range than anywhere else.)
(The reproductive-years issue does seem like a fundamental one, especially in a career where your first 10 years are just the start. Are there any good URLs or books on how accounting and law handle this?)
There isn't a consensus on sex-linked differences in IQ, but none of the realistic studies show anything close to a 1+ SD shift. You see results like a 0.33 SD shift or a 1 point narrower standard deviation. What you see on the SAT Math is a 0.3 shift in mean and a slightly narrower SD.
Also, as a practical matter, engineering is not a profession of people 2SD+ above the mean. It ranges from Texas Tech to MIT. Typical IQ's for engineers are estimated around 110-120. If we look at SAT Math scores, 600+ would be a reasonable estimate. At the ~600 level, there are about the same number of males and females, with the gap growing to about 30% females in the perfect-800 pool (3SD above the mean). In other words the observed disparities far outstrip what would be expected from standardized test scores. Even taking the studies more favorable to the aptitude argument, you'd have to have engineers at 150+ before the observed male-female ratio was consistent with what would be expected based on IQ scores alone (5:1).
And of course, this assumes the only relevant measure of engineering aptitude is SAT Math performance or IQ. In that sense it's probably an upper bound for the measure of engineering aptitude.
I'd gone back to race, not gender. I think I've seen studies which say African-Americans are as much as a sigma below general population of the US, and certain Jewish or Asian populations are a sigma above, which is 2 sigma net, which is HUGE. I don't know if I buy these studies, but to the extent that IQ measures scholastic aptitude and culture vs. innate genetic intelligence, it's possible.
Engineers at large companies are maybe 1SD above the mean; founders or "10x engineers" at startups are 2SD+.
So, a 2 sigma difference at the 1 and 2 sigma above mean levels would be huge, which is observed in the population of startup founders and famous startup engineers. But there are plenty of other explanations which would account for exactly the same observation even if there were zero difference on population "aptitude" -- it's just one plausible explanation.
(There's also the argument that Asian immigrants to the US are potentially the top of a 3 billion person set, and the total number of African-Americans is something like 30mm. But the Ashkenazi Jewish population and African-American populations are on the same order of magnitude in the US.)
During all of the arguments he made i couldn't help but think about the "lack of successful women in tech/business"-discussion that is - i guess - currently going on not only in my country.
1) Underrepresentation does not equal racism
or bias against women
2) News reports are focusing on the wrong part of the story and there are many women very successful already
3) Greed trumps gender
And also when he mentions possible solutions:
-) Increase the pipeline
Exactly. Often many women in my classes were very good at maths/science, yet only very few went on to really study something like maths/science or something strongly business-related.
But I agree that the author's way of thinking is far healthier for any given individual. Which is why the author is so successful.
Leave the people who develop knowledge and disseminate it for the rest of society alone with your political agenda.