Jesse Jackson to take on Silicon Valley's lack of diversity | Hacker News Reader

Jesse Jackson to take on Silicon Valley's lack of diversity

mercurynews.com

21 pointswozniacki35 comments

"Jesse Jackson wouldn't be heading to Hewlett Packard or any of the other big tech companies if they had done their job and accomplished diversity," she says. "He's shining a spotlight on one aspect of the growing inequality of this country."

I think that the problem of diversity in tech starts long before your interview at a Silicon Valley company. It starts at home, and at school. If you get more children of color exposed to technology (the making side, not the consuming side), math, and science early, then you'll have more of them in college, and more qualified candidates of color applying for Silicon Valley companies. What you expose kids to early on shapes what they'll become later on. If you emphasize basketball and football to Black kids, you'll get an NBA and NFL that are 70% Black.

This. I don't think companies that are fighting for qualified employees are turning down candidates because of color. I'm in a CS program at a university and I can only think of a few CS students who aren't white/Asian/Indian. The issue isn't with hiring, but with early exposure and education to all races/genders/whatevers.

Sounds like another Jackson shakedown that will benefit his children:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1964&dat=19810901&id=p...

[edit, here's another] http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-04-08/news/01040800...

I really wish we could be more pragmatic about the lack of diversity in tech. Do we really care about "diversity" or do we care that we are losing out on potential talent? And why is it always that those wringing their hands over the situation (so often non-programmer outsiders) seem to have their own axe to grind? Could it be because the valley is filled to the brim with money?

I'm in it to win it. I'm not here to help somebody else get ahead. Not that I want to kick anybody on my way to the top but this industry is very competitive. The lack of women, racial and sexual minorities is terrible and unfair and it should change, but I'm more concerned that we are shutting out smart, creative workers. In the end, isn't that the point of our (supposed) meritocracy? Diversity must come from within our community and for the right reasons, not out of the terror of being shamed by a self-appointed guardian of righteousness.

You should consider the advantage you have of being aware of the industry at all. Not everyone has that opportunity. Some portion of responsibility devolves on you to share the (not entirely meritocratic) good fortune you've received. As the song goes, check your privilege.

This is just silly. One fifth of the world is on Facebook, they are aware of Facebook and that it makes ton of money, they are aware of the industry. Interest ≠ Privilege. I grew up very poor but was always VERY interested in technology every way possible. I got a 20 year old computer used for very cheap in my early teens and learned to program on this. Almost any child is capable of this. Its not privilege, its interest. Anyone with interest is perfectly capable.

There are environments in which interest is much less likely to develop. For instance, what if your peers had thought and repeated that learning and reading were stupid? Or what if your parents were completely apathetic about your education? Or what if one of your parents was in jail your entire life? What if you had no choice but join a gang?

There are children, and maybe you were one of them, who can persevere despite these circumstances. But I think it's important to note that the differences in interest can also be a result of 'privilege'.

That wouldn't be donatj's fault, it would be the fault of the culture holding their people back. Maybe JJ should look inward instead of outward for a solution.

I agree. I think that Jesse Jackson is indeed being ridiculous in what he is targeting. We should be investigating the systems that lead to a lack of minority candidates applying to work at these companies.. Namely, systems like the entirety of the criminal justice system with discriminatory policies such as 3 strikes or the war on drugs.

At my last company, I interviewed around 100 candidates for senior/principal software engineering positions.

There was filtering before things got to me, and maybe the people doing the filtering were racist. (I don't think so, but how would I know?)

But of those 100 candidates, only one was black.

I think somewhere upstream the pipeline is broken.

I find this sentence very weirdly written from a stat viewpoint and not helpful at all to the "average" reader.

>>>>About one in 14 tech workers is black or Latino both in the Silicon Valley and nationally. Blacks and Hispanics make up 13.1 and 16.9 percent of the U.S. population, respectively, according to the most recent Census data.

Why didn't they say about 7% rather than 1 in 14?

1/14 ~=7.14..%

I accidentally scrolled into the comment section and my head imploded. Thank goodness for HN :)

Because the average reader may be inclined to think the numbers are reasonable, and then they'd be less likely to spark an outrage, and then this newspaper wouldn't get as many ad impressions.

I'm confused, black and hispanics make a combined 30% of the U.S. population but 7.14% of tech workers and that seems reasonable?

What am I missing here?

Yes, it does. The number that matters is number of available black and hispanic tech workers versus the number of employed black and hispanic tech workers. If there was a large discrepancy between unemployment rates for technology workers along racial lines, then we could claim discrimination by companies.

Instead, what you and this article are talking about is that perhaps not enough black and hispanic people are being exposed to technology as an industry. In which case, the failure would be on a lot of variables: community, family, schools, socioeconomic status, etc.

Blaming a company for not hiring non-existent people is sure great for Jesse Jackson's business model, though.

It's also possible that there is a legitimate reason (from a business perspective) they'd preferentially hired white tech workers, such as socioeconomic class leading to better training. (We see this effect in other places.)

I highly doubt that many of the confounding variables (age; exposure over time; socioeconomic status; etc) have been ruled out to come up with that statistic.

Not that I don't think there's a problem, just saying, the businesses might not be racist so much as minorities underperform (relative to their potential) because of socioeconomic factors. If that's truly what's happening, I'd argue that the place to combat that is the economics of the situation, and not attacking businesses for making prudent decisions.

I never, ever blamed the companies, I agree that " not enough black and hispanic people are being exposed to technology as an industry".

It could just be the particular writer's style, I doubt it is meant to misrepresent the facts, since there's no need to do so in this case, the facts by themselves are damning enough.

7%, when there should be about 30% means only 23% towards fair representation, that is still pretty bad. Of course there's the issue of the education pipeline.

You should don a hazmat suit before descending into internet comment sections, especially when it is about race.

does it necessarily have to be equal representation?

I didn’t know most of the people named as minority influencers were non-white (with the exception of Microsoft’s Satya Nadella). I read every blog post by Drummond and I had no idea he was African American. These are thought leaders who, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, are not “expert about being black” and I think they do a lot more good than Jesse Jackson.

I’m not saying there isn’t a problem -- but the solution seems to me that it should come through a system that allows a candidate to say: “There are rumors my skillset is going through a shortage. I believe I have been discriminated against by the recruitment process (no matter what that was: if you list grievances, too young, too old, too female, too male, too nerdy, too black, etc. they pretty much define a pavement of all job seekers) and it doesn’t matter. Give me a job, tell me what I can learn to be the ideal candidate, or sh-t the f-ck -p.” I haven’t been to San Francisco a lot, but everytime I was shocked by the amount of candidates throwing their CV at me; they were of every age, color, skillset and gender that I could think of. I represented a company based in Europe and they complained that European companies do not open offices in SF fast enough to hire the local talent… (which came out as… well, mind-blowing self-serving and unworldly to me).

I hate to ask but… Is he really going after a guy called Gomez about diversity in power positions? And I’m sur HP was iconic when Jesse Jackson was more active, but… isn’t there more iconic companies around? They might not have public shareholder meetings.

There is plenty of diversity in the Valley... Indians, Asians, Europeans... What is his issue here?

As an Asian American male, I've seen a great mixture of white and Asian men in tech companies in Silicon Valley. I've never worked in a frat house type startup, but rather ones with a great mixture of high end talent. So I concede I might be only experiencing an outlier.

Asians in America put a much higher priority on education than other races, at least based on college graduation statistics. If you look at marriages, the pairings which have the highest rate of possessing a college degree are Asian/Asian, White/Asian, and Asian/White. Most engineering jobs require a degree, so is it really a surprise that Asian's have higher representation in tech than perhaps other races?

I chose to do coding and design because it was something I enjoyed. Growing up, I did it on my own time despite the fact that it wasn't a particularly socially attractive endeavor especially compared to sports. I'm not griping that the NFL/NHL/MLB or Hollywood have few Asian American men or that I didn't end up going into those industries.

I get annoyed when people just assume that 'men' in tech purposefully exclude other races and genders. I couldn't care less the race or gender of the applicant.

I'm half white and half Korean. This sums it up.

How wealthy were your parents and neighbors?

Parents: Upper-class

Neighbours: Upper-class

That being said, I went to a no-name high school and no-name college. I worked my way into startups through connections in college and living abroad.

This is why I get annoyed when I hear people claim that their workplace is a true meritocracy and 20 of 20 employees are white males. So only white males have the intellectual talent to make it in tech?

I totally get that it's not meant that way, but that's what it looks like to people who are not in SV tech.

Off topic but since this has come up this week several times: Meritocracies seem great in theory but rarely work in practice. What exactly are we measuring? How much code you can write in an hour? The quality of the code? What if you spend more time helping other members of your team with new concepts and that limits the amount of code you can write? What about the people in the office who support you and help you get things done faster? Do we include things like pairing skills?

The only time I worked at company who claimed to be a meritocracy I benefited greatly but people whose skills weren't as easily measured were unfairly left behind. We had a PM quit after being denied a raise and his departure set us back quite a bit, clearly we weren't measuring his value accordingly.

Not that I have any particular stance on the legitimacy of meritocracies, but why would a meritocracy imply racial diversity, exactly?

If the system were fully meritocratic, you'd expect a lot more females in the industry, for one. Unless you suppose that females of all races are objectively less capable in some way. But then you'd have to explain why there are so many females being successful in other hard sciences like biology.

The fact is that many people aren't given early access and encouragement to technology, and the ones that do experience constant pressure and put-downs. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not. I've done hundreds of interviews and dozens of interview trainings, and have personally observed lots of silly behavior, from treating women more harshly than men, to dismissing a candidate because their family name implied a background of poverty.

A "safe" example to think about: it's very common to rubbish people who went to this university or that one instead of yours, which is obviously the best. You can write that off as good-natured play, but consider that I've had to build a career in tech without a degree. It's only by the slimmest chain of coincidences that I was able to even get the opportunity to be seen and evaluated. The "meritocratic" system simply doesn't believe that anyone without the nous to afford college is worth even noticing.

The hiring manager at the end of that food chain is often unaware of all that. He (and it's usually a "he") passes over resumes and chuckles at their university choices, then picks "the good ones" to jump through hoops and from there picks "the best". To him, that's meritocracy.

Alright, I can agree with that.

Once again though, meritocracy would only mean equal opportunity and not necessarily facilitate any particular effort for equal representation. A system can still be meritocratic (although I'm not saying ours is) while social influences still skew the demographics.

Assuming that raw talent is equally spread among races, and that education is equally effective for all races, then a meritocracy should have a racial diversity that is the same as the larger population's.

I consider the first assumption (equal raw talent) to be quite probable. I consider the second assumption to be implausible.

Black and hispanics make a combined 30% of the U.S. population but 7.14% of tech workers, if we were a true meritocracy you wouldn't expect those numbers.

Of course, this isn't the fault of the tech industry. People in lower socio-economic classes are not exposed to technology at early ages and often don't have the ability to go college.

So if tech is a meritocracy it's a meritocracy for people in certain classes.

Especially, when taken as the starting point, an income distribution for candidates that is biased along racial lines?

(Income of family is known to be linked to educational quality.)

If Rev. Jackson (or anyone) knows of an untapped pool of talented developers with some combination of skills in C++, C#, crypto, network security, and/or machine learning, my team is hiring.

Even the degree could be negotiable if (as in my own case) the candidate has acquired a solid understanding of CS principles some other way.

Perhaps Jesse Jackson should contribute to an open source project of his choice then.

You don't have to be an expert in a field to criticize it's culture.

a noble task in ignoble hands

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