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Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

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Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#171

Post by seivan »

arijun wrote: post #161
mafribe wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affirmative action is a failure; it's nothing but a form of welfare. Failure from what vantage point? If you want to keep society stable and peaceful, some degree of welfare is probably necessary, for otherwise, those that imagine themselves to be wronged might just band together and violently take what they think has been denied to them.

I imagine pacification is not the goal of most affirmative action proponents.

It is/was in Singapore through LKY.

As usual, perfect lies in the middle through pragmatism. "Only Siths think in absolutes"

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#172

Post by tantalor »

bsmoke wrote: post #157
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #100

What a big steaming pile of political correctness. The author interviews a tiny handful of mediocre college students who blame their "color" for not getting hired right out of school by big, glamorous tech companies. Are we supposed to be sympathetic? I remember my own struggles to break into the tech business, many years ago now. Although white and "privileged", i.e. no cultural barriers to entry, I found it very to…

How do you know they're mediocre coders? The article makes zero mention of any coding ability, aside from the fact that some of them were having a hard time locking down offers from places like Google and Facebook. Your biases are applying traits to these kids, all of whom you've never met or had any kind of conversation with. This entire post is the biggest affirmation of "twice the work" if I've ever seen it.

Best guess: Howard is ranked #391 in CS nationally

Source: http://computer-science-schools.com/howard-university

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#173

Post by geofft »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #100

What a big steaming pile of political correctness. The author interviews a tiny handful of mediocre college students who blame their "color" for not getting hired right out of school by big, glamorous tech companies. Are we supposed to be sympathetic? I remember my own struggles to break into the tech business, many years ago now. Although white and "privileged", i.e. no cultural barriers to entry, I found it very to…

> What I do know is, you can't compensate for that by handing people undeserved opportunities.

How do you know this?

Not that I agree with your framing, but even if I accept it for the sake of argument, that black culture is lazy and underachieving in a way white culture isn't, it still seems to me that if you hand black people undeserved opportunities (leaving aside that the word "undeserved" is a huge stretch here, given that you've just admitted that it's for no fault of their own), they'll move into a culture of good white traits like being smart and competitive and creative, and they'll have kids who grow up looking up to their parents' hard-working, humble, humorous white coworkers at Google.

Doesn't that have measurable positive results?

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#174

Post by jgalt212 »

How about this?

Black engineers would prefer to work in IT at a big bank with high steady pay than opt for the highly variable risk/return profile of being an engineer in SV.

And why do they do this? If you look at poverty being an overriding theme for blacks in America, even if they themselves are not poor, then one would clearly prefer a lower risk med/high reward job than an a high risk low or super-high reward job.

Now the above only explains why black Americans underparticpate in start-culture. It says nothing for why they are underrepresented at high paying low risk shops like FB, Google, YHOO, Salesforce, ORCL, etc. Unless, of course, if you need to have first slugged it out at a few start ups before getting a job at a bigger shop. I'd say that's maybe only true for parallel hires and not kids right out of university.

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#175

Post by ryanlol »

auggierose wrote: post #60

Let's assume there is this black guy / girl sitting in the interview room with you. You (white) are asking interview questions and you soon realise that the person you are interviewing is excellent. But something is off, you can't really put your finger on it. What do you do?

How does the color of the person affect this situation?

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#176

Post by hibikir »

travjones wrote: post #40

I've only been to SF twice, but I have to agree that it is pretty white. Not as white as Colorado, but still. I also toured Medium and was blown away by the lack of black folks working there. It's tough to describe the feeling, but when you're the only black person in the room, you do feel different--a little uncomfortable. However, I don't think this reflects a conscious effort to not hire blacks, rather there are i…

Yes, there's not a big black community in San Francisco. There's an unusually large southeast asian community though, which is uncommon in many other parts of the US.

Still, even smaller divides can be stark. I am white and I live in St Louis. There are a lot of black people in St Louis. However, there's parts of the city where it's very uncommon to see black people, while in others, black people have asked me if I got lost or something, because I am the only white guy around. There's the famous Delmar Line, where two blocks separate an expensive white neighborhood from some of the poorest black areas of the city. In the middle two blocks, there's a lot of men in blue.

I mean, I've done software in this town for 15 years. That gives me hundreds of work acquaintances. Out of those, FOUR are black, and one is a first generation immigrant from Kenya.

The biggest work contrast is a company that ran a call center in premises. HR, Accounting, IT... one black guy. The call center, paying $10/hr? 75% black.

I am not sure of how much of all of this is racism vs socioeconomic barriers (although I am sure there's some of all), but segregation is so very real.

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#177

Post by alistproducer2 »

devalier wrote: post #128

Computer programming is one of the most cognitively demanding professions in existence. Ability to program correlates pretty highly with cognitive test scores, such as the SAT Math. If you look at the top scorers on such tests in America, only about 1% are black. The ratio of black engineers in Silicon Valley matches what you would expect based on the test scores. To see it visually, this is the bell curve based on m…

Your "sources" are dubious (at best). Why don't you link to some studies that back up your imgur you got from chimpout or some other fine upstanding white nationalist blog.

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#178

Post by falcolas »

wooger wrote: post #79
PaulHoule wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't the hero of the last Star Wars movies black?

The hero is a white woman - Finn is a bumbling sidekick.

I'd say that Finn is the heart of the movie. He ends up doing the right things because he cares, not because of a destiny (Rei) or sense of obligation (Han).

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#179

Post by rhino369 »

pingou wrote: post #126
joslin01 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by the French try to assimilate people more? I'm confused because France is notoriously horrendous to tourists. I've seen polls rate it as the worst place for customer service with tourists and my own brother's experience got him nearly in a fight with some French guys bullying him. Furthermore, this is just a cultural thing. I'm white and was in a team with a bunch of white engineers that loved cars…

Well I'm not an expert but it seems to me that in France we expect minorities to leave a good part of their culture and become "real french", eat cheese, wear beret and never walk without a baguette under their arms, whereas in the US I was under the impression that there's a lot more effort from minorities to differentiate themselves. I don't think we can really talk of a "black culture" in France (at least not in t…

America is undisputedly the best country at assimililating immigrants. It comes from doing it for centuries. We are one of the only countries with complete mixed ethnicities and a strong nationality.

But that doesn't really work for blacks because they aren't a different culture, they are a subculture. Their culture has been a part of American culture from the beginning. For almost all of American history they were essentially banned from mainstream culture.

So nobody can make them assimililate. They didn't come here as an immigrant. Their ancestors were kidnapped and enslaved here.

FYI the world thinks France is particularly bad at assimilation. I don't know if that is just a stereotype but that's how it's viewed.

Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom

#180

Post by autoreleasepool »

huac wrote: post #99
ryanlol wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not what she says, her problem isn't that she doesn't like Marvel Cinematic Universe but that she feels that she doesn't have much in common with people of other races.

those are basically the same thing to put it another way: if your white friends grew up watching spongebob squarepants and you grew up without cable, that could certainly make a cultural difference

> grew up without cable, that could certainly make a cultural difference

I don't understand. This would happen to anyone who grew up in poverty. What does it have to do with race?

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