Oakland hackathon tries to broaden Silicon Valley’s recruitment pipeline | Hacker News Reader

Oakland hackathon tries to broaden Silicon Valley’s recruitment pipeline

sfchronicle.com

14 pointsjdavis70311 comments

"In 2013, only 1 percent of the California high school students who took the Advanced Placement were Latino or African American."

How does that reconcile with:

"How can you have a culture that talks about its meritocracy [Silicon Valley], but when you press them, you see that they're 70 percent white,"

How is it Silicon Valley's fault when you can see these racial disparities as early as high school?

"We have to tell young people that here is this pathway where you can make $90,000 to $111,000 and the cops aren't going to come knocking on the door. You can keep the money. You don't have to win ‘America's Got Talent,'." Jones said. "And it's right there under the noses of people living in Northern California."

Want to find out how to make $90k working from home!? Signup for my $99 hackathon today! Space is limited!

I think the mindset here is that there are Latinos & African Americans who have the talent but not opportunity; or for some reason aren't attending hackathons outside of Oakland. Part of it is rarely seeing a person of color in a computer engineering role.

>>"They think they can become president but they don't think they can get a job at a computer company," he said. "That's because they've actually seen an African American become president. They haven't seen an African American at a computer company."

Not to single out Ycombinator, but just go to http://ycombinator.com/ and let the images do their auto-transitioning. I'm only pointing to YC because it's the handly link at the moment. Well, and this too - http://www.fastcodesign.com/3024388/slideshow-the-tech-indus...

Now, I know I'm about to get the HN vulcan team to tear me & that quote to pieces. Let me preempt them by saying that seeing other Latinos/African-Americans in a role greatly helps enforce the concept that you, if you're of one of those ethnicities, are capable of reaching that role too. Please let's not get pedantic and try to say this isn't the case. It very much is. That's why the efforts to bring women and minorities to tech exists.

Also, I won't be debating[1]. I'm just saying this one comment and I'm ---out--->.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7100307

EDIT: And you're right, charging $99 is crazy. I can understand charging a "token fee" to try and filter for serious people but $99 is way too high. More like $10. Maybe $20 at the max considering the average income of people in the ethnics groups targeted.

>Part of it is rarely seeing a person of color in a computer engineering role.

It's sad that we live in an age where it's acceptable to avoid a career field because you don't want to be around people of a different skin color.

I agree that charging $99 undermines their goals greatly :/

Actually, SV hackathons tend to have a lot of Asian, Mexican, Indian, female, and even some high school and grade school participation. SF hackathons seem more like the white young Caucasian guy stereotype the article complains about. I guess because it cheaper to live in the south bay so there are more immigrants starting out there and more people moving out there from the city to start families/buy houses/be closer to jobs.

Moving east from Palo Alto to East Palo Alto to Mountain View to Sunnyvale to Santa Clara to San Jose is pretty much a cost of living drop each step. I know I rented cheap in East Palo Alto down there working on a startup once for quite a few months and the neighborhood was predominantly mexican culture. Got lots of fresh burritos each morning for cheap and coded a lot.

I guess it's popular to just claim SV is everything wrong, though.

I agree there needs to be more opportunity to overcome the head-start white males have in being accepted into technology jobs and in effect, level the playing field.

However... the "Hackathon costs $99" at the end almost ruins this for me. It needs to be free. IMO something like this should only be done as a non-profit.

A $99 hackathon improves your odds of getting a job programming to roughly the same extent that a $99 pair of sneakers improves your odds of getting a job playing basketball.

Is it me or is it strange to put emphasis on getting into companies with a "fratboy culture"? Pardon my language here, but if it's a fratboy culture I stay the fuck away. Those are not jobs you want to aspire to.

I think part of the way to get really good in this business is to start very early -- and that unfortunately leads into questions of wealth disparity among other issues. If you come from a household that gets their kid a computer to mess around with that already comes with economic biases.

As evidence the SF chronicle show stats for 'US Tech workers,' which includes everyone across the country.

Here's some easy to find contradictory stats on SV:

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_22094415/asian-workers-now-dom...

Further "white-male-dominated 'bro culture,'" is racist, luckily its only unnamed 'advocates' claiming that and not anyone who would cheapen their name..

    "Only 6 percent of U.S. tech workers are African American 
    and 7 percent are Latino; 15 percent are Asian American 
    and 71 percent are white, according to 2011 census data."

Uggg, I hate statistics like those paraded in this article that are basically worthless without the corresponding percentages that each group represents of the general population.

FWIW:

                  General population    Tech populations
    . Caucasian                  63%                 ???
    . African Am.              13.6%                  6%
    . Latino                     17%                  7%
    . Asian                      13%                 15%

When you look at it with these numbers it puts it in perspective. The original article made it sound like blacks, latinos and asians were disadvantaged to non-hispanic caucasians in that order from worst to least worse, when the reality is that latinos are least represented relative to the general population, african america has it a little bit less worse and asian americans actually were doing far better than white people relative to the percent of the general purpose that they represent.

I really want to see all sources of journalism hire an editor whose sole purpose is to double check that no stupid statistics make it to print.

This is not the bro culture then. The article confabulates that Silicon Valley culture is "bro culture" and the errors multiply from there. They never establish that bro culture is rooted in Silicon Valley; that is an 'axiom' I haven't heard until this point, but I'm sure if you're from CA, everything comes from CA.

I mean you first heard about this culture in SV right? and most people first heard about it in SV too right? So it came from SV? Wait?

Oh wait, bro culture is just SV culture with frats? Are you sure you're not talking about frat cultures in SV and calling it bro culture?

Next thing I'll hear is how hipsters are all the same and unions are self interested organizations that don't serve their members. Then a tribe will tell me about how evil tribalism is, so I should align my behavior with your tribe's bureaucracy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com