Race in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Race in Silicon Valley

fastcompany.com

60 pointscrdr8868 comments

I don't mean to diminish the point they're making in the article at all, but there are some parts that jump out...

"And imagine that the worst happens, that your startup fails. You're still good, right? You can just go back to whatever school that you decided to take a leave of absence from . . . or just draw from your trust fund. But when you start a company and you're a black entrepreneur, in some cases there is no alternative. It's a much different experience."

The vast majority of people don't have trust funds and family that can write $50,000 checks on a whim. Obviously in some communities that percent is 99.99% vs 99%, but we're still comparing economic class rather than race.

"Trust fund" is perhaps a bit spun. But if you look at it as a social class issue (yes, the quote says "black", but it sounds like a point about poverty to me), the truth is that an awful lot of young "software entrepreneurs" spend their time living at home: They walk about in their middle class neighborhoods with quality internet access, solid development hardware available on their parents' dime, quiet private bedrooms with nice furniture, and easy access to a private car when needed.

Think of starting the next Facebook in an urban apartment where multiple siblings have to share the bedrooms and laptop and maybe the point will be clearer.

> Think of starting the next Facebook in an urban apartment where multiple siblings have to share the bedrooms and laptop and maybe the point will be clearer.

Or from a rural trailer park. Racial demographics aside, rural areas are consistently the poorest areas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_poverty#Case_study:_Unite...

...and especially poignant here, poor kids in rural areas have dial-up internet at best and no city libraries or internet cafes to walk to. And the smart and driven ones have no access to STEM magnet schools.

Tangential, but I once heard sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling say that he was more interested in writing about what happened with technology in the hands of someone sitting in a mobile home eating cheetos than with some guy in a suit in an office tower.

I wish they would properly frame it as a social class issue. I try to read past it, but it still rankles when they present it as race. I didn't have it as hard as some kids do, but not every white kid has/had a trust fund, fast internet, fast computers...

I grew up in near-poverty in a trailer next to farm, sharing a bedroom with two siblings and a computer with five siblings. The challenges are largely similar across race, even the socialization challenges. That's why these articles about all the privileges I supposedly had/have are so frustrating. My challenges are/were invisible AND my accomplishments are being continually diminished by these individuals, meanwhile they are getting a platform in mainstream publications, have numerous diversity programs to lean on, and are (in tech) rewarded doubly for the same good work. Nobody cares about trailer park white (or asian) kids and the enormous challenges they face or the ladder they had to climb.

That's the problem with identity politics and social theory. It a notoriously unreliable bracketing system based on utterly superficial traits, only done for its simplicity and political correctness, not for its accuracy.

>we're still comparing economic class rather than race.

Then it's important to be truthful and realistic about the distribution of race across economic classes. "The vast majority" is not a statement of a number or percentage, and will be a different number whether you're talking about black people and white people, or Oregonians and Arkansans.

As a black Nigerian (it's another level) that spent time this year in the valley, I have a different perspective I hope to elaborate more on in future.

Empathy is going to be important in helping improve things and I believe successful minorities, in my case black (Nigerian) people have a better chance than a white person (without my circumstance) and should step up more.

With my cold emails, it was easier for me to meet white people in tech than black people in tech when I spent 4 months there.

There is a reason Indians no longer have this minority problem.

I hope to write more elaborately about it soon.

BTW, here is the main article. It's a great read http://www.fastcompany.com/3037933/the-visible-man

Some choice quotes:

"So even for a mid-level or lower-level engineer, they'll tell us, "I only want someone who went to Stanford," or someone who has started a company before."

"And most companies in Silicon Valley say, "We hire from these five schools, period," right?"

"If you go to those five schools, the percentage of minorities and the percentage of women is X and Y. Let's say it's 3% and 10%. If those companies hire only 10% of the people they interview, then the number [of minority hires] you get is zero. Right? It's zero."

Absolutely revolting.

"We hire from these five schools, period," right?"

I'm so glad they brought this up. This is the elephant in the living room, and is a root cause behind a lot of these issues.

The "top ten universities" fetish is by far the most significant mechanism for the perpetuation of aristocracy and aristocratic networks in our society. It's a effectively a feudal system of "knighthood," or at least analogous to that. Those who are admitted to top tier universities are tapped to be at least considered as future members of the nobility.

I'd love to see some real data on employee (and founder) performance vs. where they went to school.

Recruiting only the top 1% nobility is a peculiar power mismatch unless your company really is one of the top 1% nobility of all employers.

What I'm getting at is if you're a bottom 10% marketing experiment startup, demanding to recruit top 1% talent, you're going to get some self selected weirdos. You better check their references and backgrounds to make sure, and its foolish to assume anything about their demographics is going to be normal. There's probably a reason a claimed top 1% applies to a bottom 10% employer and its probably not good. Best case scenario is addiction to extreme risk taking. Worst case, well, its pretty bad, closet full of skeletons or outright fabrication of background or worse.

(edited to add, my example is unfortunately too extreme, but the general rule holds that the wider the mismatch the weirder the applicants are going to be... top 1% vs bottom 10% will as I propose be really weird, yet still, demanding top 1% at a "mere" top 10% employer is still going to be all messed up. Also by "worse" I mean stuff like fired for cause because of sexual harassment and stuff like that, and this explains a lot about the stereotypical bro)

On the other hand, if you want to work at a pretty boring median fortune 500 type company, we have plenty of women and minorities. Unsurprisingly if you demand normal people for normal work you get a normal-ISH distribution of gender and race. Maybe not perfect but not some absolutely laughable 3% stat.

Pro athletic teams demand weird non-median employees... not the median walmart shopper. Unsurprisingly their demographics tend toward the bizarre compared to the general population. Google for NBA racial demographics, its truly weird compared to the general population, as an example.

Here's what I've noticed.

There's no correlation.

It doesn't mean anything. It's a position taken out of fear.

At this point, if you've graduated from top ten universities I will ignore your resume, because you won't have the hunger I want from an employee, nor where you have great creative thinking.

That's been my suspicion for some time too.

"Nobody ever got fired for hiring someone from Stanford."

I've hired a fair number of people, college educated (UK top schools), 1 from a top tier US university and a whole scala of other levels of education, all the way to none.

My experience (which is very limited) was that the people that were less educated had more drive because they were given a chance but the people that had a degree of education that was generally perceived as higher were more productive even without that level of drive and the quality of their output was generally higher.

This is probably not surprising but with very few exceptions that seemed to be the rule (and those exceptions were totally off the scale).

So you'd say that the median performance is higher from the top schools, but that the difference appears less pronounced at the extreme ends of the curve?

Basically this would mean that an average person from Stanford would probably be better than an average person from University of Nowheresville, but that an exceptional person from the latter might be as good as an exceptional person from the former...?

If true this would account for a tendency to try to recruit from top schools, since the odds of getting a better candidate might overall be higher. But it doesn't change the overall social implications much.

No, an exceptional person without any formal education can blow a person with a formal education clear out of the water both in drive and in productivity and quality.

But that's 'exceptional' for you, it is an exception, I've only encountered one such person to date.

> I've hired a fair number of people, college educated (UK top schools), 1 from a top tier US university and a whole scala of other levels of education, all the way to none.

Did you mean to say "scale" here?

No, I meant scala. It's not just a programming language :)

scala(Noun)

Ladder; sequence.

http://www.definitions.net/definition/scala

However, the unfortunate truth is that no one is willing to risk getting fired over not hiring the very best. And often, this means that only the top tier schools have a chance.

The laws of limited supply are your friend here. They may want to hire only from the top tier schools but since these are typically only available in certain numbers and usually already gainfully employed this becomes less of a problem because they probably can't.

> If you go to those five schools, the percentage of minorities and the percentage of women is X and Y. Let's say it's 3% and 10%.

I am also miffed at that kind of elitism and parochialism.

That being said, both of those numbers are very low for general enrollment at top universities. MIT is a little over half male and about a third white. Even if you don't count Asians (I guess they're not minorities?), 3% and 10% are extremely lowball estimates. Or are we talking only about students with software-related majors? Does anyone have stats that describe the demographic breakdown for computer science majors?

Source: http://web.mit.edu/ir/pop/students/diversity.html

Asians are essentially the 21st century's Jews as far as universities go. The universities want some, because they bring up the academic stats, but they don't want too many of them so they tweak their admissions processes to not let too many in. They just can't be as honest about it as they could with Jews in, say, the 1930s when they actually had explicit public quotas.

From 1990 to the present, the number of Asian college students nearly doubled, but if you look at most of the top universities, Asian percentages have been pretty much flat, with the exception of MIT and Caltech. At Caltech, Asians are now the biggest group, at 47%. Whites are only 33%. Next comes Hispanic/Latino at 11%, multi-race (not Hispanic/Latino) at 7%, and Black at 2%. MIT incoming class of 2018 is around 30% Asian (50% White, 14% Hispanic/Latino, 11% Black) [1]. (45% women at MIT, 40% at Caltech).

Caltech's distribution is probably closest to an accurate representation of the demographics of top STEM students coming out of high school, because Caltech does not take into account race or gender when making admission decisions. There's still some distortion, though, for a couple of reasons.

First, Caltech does actively seek out strong minority and female STEM students and try hard to persuade them to apply, and they have run projects that have provided summer science programs for high school students in minority districts to give them a boost. Once someone applies, however, race and gender are not considered for the admission decision. In 2010, according to numbers I saw, this resulted in 106 Black applicants (out of 4859 total applicants). 19 were accepted (out of 610 total acceptances). Only 6 of those decided to attend.

Second, the Asian numbers at Caltech are probably boosted a bit by the de facto Asian quotas at the Ivy League schools, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and other top schools (other than MIT). There are probably several Asians at Caltech who would have picked one of those other schools if they hadn't been shut out because of their race. MIT might get a boost from this factor, too.

There's probably also a bit of an Asian boost at Caltech because of location. There is a noticeable skew in Caltech's student body toward people who come from the West side of the country, which is also where Asians are more concentrated.

[1] http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/profile

> "Even if you don't count Asians (I guess they're not minorities?)"

We are, and we have our own problems with race and tech (see: representation of Asians overall vs. representation of Asians in leadership positions), but the Asian-American experience is fundamentally different from the Black- or Hispanic-American experience.

We are also frequently used as bludgeons against other races. As if the disparity between Asian enrollment in schools and Black enrollment comes simply down to working hard enough. It's important to note that some of this "Asians as bludgeons against other races" comes from Asian individuals.

Asians in America do not fit into a simplistic race narrative. We are not "as good as" whites, but neither do we have many of the same problems that face Blacks and Hispanics.

There was an article I read about the nature of being Asian in tech, and one quote stuck out to me: "we have a problem, and we are a problem, at the same time".

The presence of Asians should not be mistaken as the lack of a race and diversity problem.

We are not "as good as" whites

Well, in some key ways (at least for tech) Asians are better - e.g. a +0.5 SD average IQ boost really helps for the cognitive and analytical challenges that are commonly encountered in the tech/programming worlds.

> Even if you don't count Asians (I guess they're not minorities?)

Not according to the NSF, strangely enough -- people of Asian decent are not classified as an underrepresented group within STEM fields. Pick another US .gov agency and it might be different.

It's worth noting that "minority" and "underrepresented group" mean different things. I think you are right to talk about underrepresented groups instead of minorities because under-representation is at the heart of the issue.

> "If you go to those five schools, the percentage of minorities and the percentage of women is X and Y. Let's say it's 3% and 10%. If those companies hire only 10% of the people they interview, then the number [of minority hires] you get is zero. Right? It's zero."

I agree in principle, but this math seems off... Sure you only hire 10% of the people you interview, but if all the people you hire come from these 5 schools, then you should still have 3% minorities and 10% women (since 100% of your employees are from these schools).

3% and 10% are plenty revolting, there's no need for them to fudge the numbers.

The other bias that shows up is the different requirements portrayed to people based on their race. There was a recent article about how this was done in Lousiana to keep an apartment community predominantly white.

I see my company pulling a similar stunt. Employees are strictly hired through a recruiting firm and only after passing the interview do we bother to have them actually submit an actual application where the gender & ethnicity stats are collected. I suppose this enables us to be able to say, "we have hired 100% of all black/hispanic/asian/etc people that have ever applied to our corporation. There is no way that we are racist at all. We can't help it that 99.9999% of applicants ever, were white."

Human beings only come in discrete quanta.

"We hire from these five schools, period,"

This is a strange thing for them to do. I know on occasion that they do hire immigrants; who certainly did not go to "these five schools".

What? Can anybody comment if it is true that many SV companies only hire from a handful of elite schools?

Well, I can tell you that not only did I not graduate from an elite school, I didn't even graduate from college. I've never had a problem finding work at startups. Very rarely does anyone care -- it's always about whether or not you have the necessary skills.

Maybe not intentionally, but if your workforce is mostly MIT/Stanford grads and part of your recruiting strategy involves sending employees to their Alma Maters and leveraging their social networks, there is a bit of positive feedback in play biasing recruitment towards MIT/Stanford. Totally anecdotal, but there was no Apple recruitment presence at the school I went to until a few students were hired into Apple.

I work as a consultant in SV doing Ruby on Rails.

I've done 100+ interviews and never once did the school come in as a prerequisite.

The teams are generally small. We make the coding exercises intense. You will be asked to code onsite. At the end of the day, we just want a guy that we're not constantly cleaning up after.

A few companies I know only do college recruiting from specific schools (the elite schools). The Director of College Recruiting for one of those companies told me - we only go to those schools for recruiting events; however, anybody from any school in the US can apply for any vacancy listed on our website; the person will simply have a longer/larger pipeline to go through.

I should add that the companies that I'm referring to are NOT startups.

It is not true.

> Let me tell you a story. We only had five Fellows in our first class at Code2040, but they were amazing. We had one Fellow who had a 4.7 out of a 5.0 GPA, was copresident of his school, varsity athlete at MIT. They went through the program and excelled. But when they interviewed at larger companies, they had to do these "whiteboard" interviews, where you're given a coding challenge and you go to the whiteboard and attack it. And our guys didn't get hired, right? They had never done a whiteboard interview. So, in that case, is there something wrong with the fellow, or is there something wrong with the interview process? Folks need to really understand what implicit biases they have. Until they do, the numbers aren't gonna change.

Is he implying that the interview was biased because the coding camp didn't teach people about whiteboard interviews?

I think he's fairly explicitly stating that whiteboard reviews are probably bogus. I don't think that's too controversial of a position to hold these days.

I think he's also saying that whiteboard interviews probably disadvantage people from atypical backgrounds. I think that's probable. I've seen people with good resumes struggle in whiteboard interviews due to what I guess are communication and confidence issues.

> I think he's fairly explicitly stating that whiteboard reviews are probably bogus. I don't think that's too controversial of a position to hold these days.

There has been a lot of criticism of whiteboard interviews, but they're still used because nobody has come up with a good alternative. Larger "take-home" programming assignments are vulnerable to cheating, and "Work with us for a week" only works for people who either freelance or are unemployed.

I also wouldn't say that they're "bogus". Flawed, certainly.

That makes sense to me, interview problems are highly synthetic and most people will probably need to prep specifically for the common tech interview process. If you don't have access to people who are interviewing regularly then it would be easy not to fully grasp how important this type of thing is to your earning power, given the lack of importance to your job performance.

That's a pretty poor coding camp that doesn't prepare students for the decades-old standard interview process.

Essentially. This is part of a culture pass he speaks about. If he were really exposed to the tech community, he would realize that whiteboard interviews tend to be pretty widespread.

Erm, I'm not so sure about that. When I applied to Google the recruiter literally explained there will be whiteboard interviews. She even recommended a book about preparing for software interviews. (I think I read about half of the book.)

It can be daunting if you never expected it, but whiteboard interviews are ubiquitous: you should be prepared except perhaps for your very first such interview. (And it shouldn't take more than two weeks or so. Just re-read the first half of, say, CLRS (or any algorithm textbook you should have studied before), and try solving a few of the problems on the whiteboard.)

As an MIT grad this example sounds like horseshit.

1. 4.7 out of 5.0 = 3.7 out of 4.0, which isn't really something to flaunt.

2. MIT has amazing career prep. I imagine a lot of schools do. There is no way a candidate got blindsided by whiteboard questions.

"Right, and I want black people to be massively, undeniably successful..."

Contextually, the sentiment of wanting black leadership to pave the way and inspire black youth that success is possible is a noble cause. However, this sentiment exists everywhere regardless of race, religion, sex. People are proud to identify with successful group identities.

The elephant in the room to be tackled in the face of "diversity initiatives" is in the unspoken, unwritten, virtually-non-litigable personal biases. The interviewee touches on it with how individuals can get a culture pass (e.g. sharing a love for the same band). The reality is that ethnic diversity is not a priority and a real risk factor in the beginning of a startup. It is the last thing people are thinking about. The focus is on building a great, productive team with relationships that work. Unfortunately, black and white culture has typically not worked in concert with each other to build social synergies, thus not having the culture pass becomes the unspoken tipping weight.

Of course, this cyclical cycle does not make for very virtuous feedback loops. Up till now, we end up with having predominantly black companies(FUBU,BET,Sean Jean) and predominantly white companies or predominantly black/hispanic/etc groups operating within white companies.

Many examples of successful non-white minorities who have overcome the typical challenges of their respective races appear to have assimilated to being white as well.

The real conversation to have as a society is to ask how can we blend the elements of black and white culture together such that being black or being white allows for a mixed team to be comfortable in their skin with each other?

Getting more successful black engineers, black executives, black CEOs, etc sounds great in an interview, but in the presence of real biases, all we can hope for is many wildly successful black companies where the white kids goto Stanford then Google and the black kids goto the black Stanford and goto the black Google with a small sprinkling of whites and blacks in the respective institutions.

The other elephant in the room is the growing number of developers coming from working class families failing to enter the workforce because they don't meet the standard of someone who can afford to relocate every time their business doesn't do well. Many of my friends have failed to get programming jobs even with qualifications because they were almost always beat by someone who either went to a fancy school or had connections to money.

> It's frustrating. People are "big upping" each other because they look like each other. People are big upping each other because they are white. And if I big up somebody because they're black it's a problem somehow. [...] We have a similar skin tone, and in fact, I do want to support somebody who looks like me. I think that's a good thing. Let's encourage that. I don't see why that is frowned upon. I don't see why that's reverse racism.

I'm really sorry but if you're 'big upping' anyone in any job because their skin tone matches yours, it is a big problem no matter the RGB of that tone. I'd be embarrassed every morning when I see my face in the mirror if I treated/hired some of my peers better just because they 'look like me'.

Great article overall, but I cannot say I agree with this 'we take care of our people, you take care of your people' attitude. Whether in a minority (hint: I am) or in a privileged position, I believe you should treat everyone equally, reflect on how you've been doing so and try hard to overcome your biases. I'd love to hear other people's comments on this.

No mention of Hispanics or Asians on a topic about race?

There are many valid points they raise, but this one is pure malarkey:

    But when they interviewed at larger companies, they had to do 
    these "whiteboard" interviews, where you're given a coding 
    challenge and you go to the whiteboard and attack it. And our 
    guys didn't get hired, right? They had never done a whiteboard 
    interview. So, in that case, is there something wrong with the 
    fellow, or is there something wrong with the interview process?

I hate whiteboard interviews as much as the next person, but it's not like it's a secret that whiteboard interviews are standard practice, and pretty much everyone I know that is good at them became good at them the same way; they studied.

It's pretty common advice everywhere on the internet that when you need to prepare for such interviews that you go grab yourself a copy of the well-regarded "Cracking the Code Interview" by Gayle McDowell or one of the other code interview prep books.

Failing at a whiteboard code interview is not a race or gender thing. It's a failure to do some basic research on what to expect in the interview or a failure to spend the time preparing for what you're going to encounter in the interview process.

> Most students decide at a very young age whether or not they're good in math and science.

Do they decide or are they told so on exams? Isn't being "good at math" just a function of how many math-knowledgeable adults surround you whom you could ask for help? Could educational technology (think books---not iPads) make "math help" more accessible and ultimately boost the percentage of "good in math" people to 100%?

"Isn't being "good at math" just a function of how many math-knowledgeable adults surround you whom you could ask for help?"

That point is debatable, just like many different form of talents, different people do have different inherent interest and capability at learning certain set of skills, math is no different.

Getting support and easy help can be crucial, but it's not the only bottleneck.

I agree with you that everyone has a different "innate ability" for math, but I think the variations are much smaller compared to the average. In other words, there is a bell curve, but it isn't where you think it is: http://sigeneration.ca/images/Diagram2.png via http://www.sigeneration.ca/home/resources/jump-math/

> different inherent interest

That's very true, and this is why it never made sense to me how all kids are pushed through a standardized progression of grades. What would be cool is if you can "focus" your studies on one area during one or two years of school, and then "catch up" on the subjects you left to the wayside.

I'm slightly distraught by the idea that some companies in SV are choosing their candidates by the schools they went to. They are actively working against meritocracy.

Not necessarily if we assume that the schools themselves admitted candidates based on merit, which is a pretty safe assumption. The only attendance criteria that creates a bias against merit is affordability, but my understanding is that at the very top schools there is ample scholarship funding available for the underprivileged, such that finances should never be the reason for not attending if you are accepted.

merit is assessed on continuous basis, not one time when you were young. You have merit because you are good at taking test when you're under 18, and then you'll have it easy for life, doesn't sound like the american dream to me. Moreover those schools are balancing the number of full scholarships and the number of full tuitions for economical reasons, some people are there for their parent's money.

    If you go to those five schools, the percentage of 
    minorities and the percentage of women is X and Y. 
    Let's say it's 3% and 10%. If those companies hire 
    only 10% of the people they interview, then the 
    number [of minority hires] you get is zero. Right? 
    It's zero. And to the extent that they are unwilling 
    to go outside of those five schools, it's going to 
    stay zero.

No, it's not zero, it should be a number that corresponds to 3% and 10%, respectively. Yes, those numbers suck, but it helps to get the math right.

If the number is only 3% and 10% from those schools, then the problem starts at the funnel that feeds those schools [1]. More minorities and women need to apply to those schools, so that the percentage goes up.

Should companies look beyond those five schools? Yes, but...

I'm not going to speak for any other curriculums, but the truth is that most computer science curriculums in the US are absolute garbage. Many CS programs are just java schools [0]. What these companies have done is identified the schools whose programs have a reputation for not being java schools. Historically, you could figure out which programs are not java schools by looking for those that use books like SICP, K&R, CLRS, TaoCP, PAIP, AIMA, EOPL, the dragon book, etc. as the basis for their CS curriculum. If there are schools out there with a much greater percentage of minorities and women that use such books for foundational courses, then you should suggest those schools as places to recruit from.

Simply put, the criteria for spending time, effort and money to recruit from other schools needs to be based primarily on the rigor of the curriculum, with demographics of the student body being a secondary goal.

That all being said, a lot of the best software developers I've met that didn't go to those top schools didn't graduate with a degree in computer science at all. Pretty much all the others are auto-didacts. Assuming this is generalizable, the only actionable you can extract from it is not to recruit based on school at all.

[0] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8593277

[2] FWIW, I didn't graduate from a top school (NCSU) and double majored in textile technology and apparel mgmt and psychology, so I'm not even advocating a position I myself gain from.

It becomes clearer and clearer when reading an article like this why black people have so many problems. This group of black "tech leaders" are full of bigotry and have severe victim mentality. Much of what they believe as fact isn't even the truth. Things will never improve in the black community as long as these attitudes prevail. Most blacks blame everyone but themselves. They don't take personal responsibility. This is really the issue. Sad how obvious it is, yet this PC country won't just stand up and say ENOUGH. No more handouts, work or starve. A pass is given to blacks on so many levels because of some non expiring slavery guilt card they incessantly use. Even blacks whose ancestors never even were slaves use the race card. Lower expectations of blacks combined with their willingness to accept such a thing is another reason they cannot succeed.

Black immigrant comes to America today with nothing to his name. He sees a successful person and asks "how did that person get to where he is" after being told, he works hard and becomes successful himself.

Black kids born in America today asks the same question and his (usually single) mom tells him. "Son, you have to be white to get there (your never going to amount to nothin)...

Mom says, "You have to study every day in school, get good grades, go to a university and study every day there, graduate, get an entry level job, and work, work, work your way up (pay your dues). Kid thinks for a second and says... Naw, ill just be a pro athlete if that doesn't work out I will make it big selling drugs or pimping, that sounds a lot less boring.

These two scenarios are what I have heard directly in 25 years as a career counselor working with thousands of blacks. Blacks continue to embrace a culture and attitude of failure in this country. Black culture in America is just that. Why not leave that behind?

"I have a slightly different view. In the report that Google published, they said they've spent roughly $40 million on diversity efforts over the past 10 years.

They've spent, I'll guess, several hundreds of millions of dollars in the past two years on self-driving cars. If companies like Google truly wanted to solve this problem, they'd spend more than $40 million over 10 years and make a much more significant effort.

So my conclusion is that right now we actually don't want to solve it."

Stunningly frank observation, dumping money into a project that will never see the light of day. Ah, Google.

These priorities seem sane to me. Vehicles kill over a million people every year. Self-driving cars can drastically reduce that number.

Ones that get to market, like those from Mercedes, VW, Tesla.

Google's car tech, and software, will never be adopted by an auto manufacturer. And Google will never sell cars.

I am wondering why you think that Google technologies will never be adopted. From what I have seen of the industry there is a good chance they will be adopted.

Google also does not have to sell cars to consumers, it could modify cars to sell a service.

That seems like the more appropriate market approach, right?

Cars are these large depreciating assets that spend 22 hours a day doing nothing, save for that one long road trip vacation you take.

Factor out driver salaries and driver insurance, you should save money with an on-demand fleet vs. making payments on your own vehicle.

They may just buy Uber (they are a big investor) and run their own fleet.. Lets not forget Google also has Google Shopping Express and their mapping cars.. making those self driving could be a huge thing for Google. Example: Shopping express car drives up, opens a compartment you retrieve your box and it drives off. Uber drives up you get in, it brings you to your destination you get out, no driver required.

This falls to the classic Hume's Guillotine (is-ought problem).

It's very easy to speculate about what someone should be doing vs. what is actually needed, what is being done, and the network effects of both.

I think getting more minorities in STEM from an early age (K12) would be a good start.

I agree, but in many cases there's not that much most companies can do about this. Do all the initiatives you want and raise as much money as you like, you're not going to somehow overhaul an entire culture (in family life, in schools, among peers) in a few years.

This is called the pipeline fallacy and ignores that companies hire at dramatically lower rates (0%-2% for blacks, 2%-3% for latinos) than there are graduates (4%-8%, depending on your source) for a given underrepresented background

Lower rates than there are graduates or than there are applicants to each company? Given the former, there are still numerous potential explanations for why this could be the case, none of which necessarily involve bias or discrimination on the part of the companies or hiring staff.

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