The 3 Percent – Why Tech Has a Diversity Problem

There are numerous companies that would LOVE to hire black and latino programmers. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you are black or latino (and are even halfway competent at programming), you actually have an ADVANTAGE in the hiring process because your race is so under-represented, and the companies want to satisfy their anti-discrimination policies.

The problem in these companies isn't that the candidates are being discriminated against (although there are, of course, plenty of challenges that still need to be overcome in that area). The problem is that the candidates just aren't there!

For every 50-75 white programmers that applied to work at my company, there was probably only 1 black person who applied, and that's not even taking skill level into account.

If we want to solve the racial equality and representation issues in tech, we have to start at the bottom of the funnel. We have to solve the problem at the education, support, and motivation level. We need to get younger black and latino kids and teenagers interested in programming, and we need to make sure that they have the right environment and support to pursue that dream.

I don't think "shifting" the entirety of the conversation to that is a good idea simply because focusing on the first 13 years of education [Kinder-12th] is going to take 15-17 years to show significant impacts. It simply is too long of a period for a political solution to be practical in the near term [which, lets be honest, no politician is willing to commit to a 15+ year program to fix the education system and actually champion it for that long].

Raising the enrollment numbers in college is a 2-4 year issue that neatly fits in a politician's term where they can show results on their next campaign "LOOK WHAT I DID FOR YOUR KIDS?! DO YOU SEE THESE NUMBERS?!".

Anything longer than the 2-4 year window is simply too long for anyone to care in politics.

What if we could separate them out, shield them from the negative influence of shittyness and let them flourish?

The only solution is to move them away from the bad because the negative influencers and influences are everywhere, they're in the environment, the school, the home, even the media they relate to.

A boarding school style program would work perfectly. Or a housing project with verified "good" kids and their families. The area could save money on policing and push that straight to education.

As those kids grow, they feed back into the program, becoming tutors, educators, and investors themselves. Giving others in poverty area positive role models to relate to. In other words, removing the downward spiral and replacing it with a positive feedback loop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_schools_in_the_United_...

While I admit that there's a self-selection bias with these schools--kids with parents who care about their education will apply for them to attend these schools, and those kids are much more likely to do better in school regardless, which has a self-compounding effect of better classroom environments--the quality of education I see in charter schools tends to be higher than that of standard public schools. At least from what I've seen.

Of course, the author also raises a lot of other points that aren't specific to schools: parents who are incarcerated, safety in the neighborhood, etc...

There is certainly some truth to this. On average some groups receive poorer education than other groups and one would expect them to be underrepresented to this extent given hypothetical fair hiring relative to their proportion of the general population.

But the question is whether some groups such as Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented relative to their percentage of CS or other engineering degrees for example. USA Today published an article on this:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/10/12/silicon-valley...

It may furthe be added that in many contexts technology employers claim to be desperate for "qualified" technology workers, though they are vague about what "qualified" means. They often seem to imply that a CS degree means qualified.

In fact, technology companies appear extremely picky about who they hire, often informally citing "cultural fit" which is clearly not about technical qualifications despite the high profile statements that the problem is strictly technical qualifications.

In some respects, the technology industry is very diverse with many people from all over the world and many ethnic groups. It is certainly not lily white or even close. It is not NASA mission control in the 1960's with white male engineers with buzz cuts as far as the eye can see. Even the official diversity numbers from the companies, taken at face value, claim about thirty to thirty five percent are "Asian," most of whom would not be classified as white by most people. However, there are various groups, ethnic and otherwise that are rare.

The pipeline is only a partial explanation, one the company's promote because it absolves them of any responsibility.

Last year I spent nearly the full year (along with others on my team) working to build a team, constantly attempting to hire for a variety of positions. For business positions we had a lot of female and minority applicants. For design positions there were female and minority applicants. For software there were very few (though we did over-represent in our hiring ultimately, because we lucked into some great candidates who happened to be ethnic minorities.)

Why is it that the %3 he refers to apparently more likely to seek business degrees, or art degrees than programming degrees? We certainly did have a diverse flow of candidates for those positions, but we did not for engineering. I don't think that metal detectors in schools are making people less likely to be a programmer.

I think its because programming has become a non-glamourous, non-respected profession. (Look at the wide use of the diminutive "coding" or "coder" and the patronizing words in the job applications "ninja rockstar"-- these are words you use with people you don't respect who you think are gullible. "You just might be the ninja rockstar coder we're looking for! And just because you're so special we'll be paying you 45 whole thousand dollars! Isn't that neat?"

We're pouring money like crazy into education- I read recently of a New Jersey school system which was spending 20,000 a student, and producing bad results. We've spent trillions on the war on poverty-- in fact, I read recently that something like $87,000 a year is spent per poor person. Hell, if you just gave them that money they wouldn't be poor anymore! Years ago I read that of the money that goes into the welfare system only %25 of it actually goes out in checks to welfare recipients, with %75 going into overhead.

The problem isn't a lack of money- we're spending it. The problem is a lack of incentivizes to spend that money wisely. Can you imagine a private school getting 20k per head and not producing well educated kids? Sure, it could happen, but it wouldn't stay in business for generations like public schools do.

We recognize that government is inefficient at a lot of things- basically everything. So why, if this is the most important thing, do we leave it in the hands of government? Sure if you want government to fund education, that's a different issue... but government is not good at delivering it.

I say this as a graduate of public schools, with the unique advantage of having changed schools more than once a year on average from first grade to graduation from high school. All of them were terrible. I even went to a state wide magnet school for my final two years-- it was not terrible, (my physics teacher taught at stanford, for instance, and would come teach us while working on the results of his experiments) .... but even it was nowhere near what it could have been.

The schools in the middle class neighborhoods are terrible. Why would we expect the poor neigborhoods not to be worse?