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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

#341

Post by grok2 »

rntz wrote: post #337
igonvalue wrote: post #281

The clickbait article headline is "Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?" The answer is buried three quarters of the way into the article: > When they started interviewing seniors, companies found — as Pratt did at Howard — that many were underprepared. They hadn’t been exposed to programming before college and had gaps in their college classes. So why isn't the article titled, "Why Aren't Enough Black Coders…

This is a misrepresentation of the article's position. The article's actual, more ambiguous, position is better summarized in another paragraph: > People tend to discuss Silicon Valley’s diversity problem in binary terms. One camp says companies are biased against underrepresented minorities, or at least aren’t trying hard enough to attract them. The other says there aren’t enough people from these backgrounds who ar…

This sort of assumes that it is everyone's job to try hard to attract underrepresented minorities. That's expecting way too much noble-mindedness of people. What employment tends to optimize for is good capable employees in general. If the pool does include qualified and capable minorities, they will get employed in most cases (and racial bias will likely be there only in a minority of cases -- atleast in Silicon Valley). Just employing token representatives from under-represented minorities will only perpetuate the problem (special if the token representatives end up performing poorly if they were employed not for their ability but just to represent a minority). What will help is to have a large pool of minority group grads to select from.

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

#342

Post by jophde »

Matachines wrote: post #297
ryandrake wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, that was a head scratcher. Where are these places with all white people? Because looking around at my current team, I'm one of two white guys, and there's a white woman, the remaining 20 or so are all either of south-east Asian or Chinese descent. My previous company was probably 75% Chinese, 20% Indian, and maybe 1% white. Prior to that, my company was a bit whiter, but 60%+ were foreign nationals. It gets to t…

None of those races count as minorities in these types of arguments. Only blacks, latinos, and LGBT do.

Asians and Indians are basically considered white in the Bay Area at this point.

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

#343

Post by colmvp »

ebola1717 wrote: post #280
colmvp wrote: post #269

“There are not a lot of people of color in the Valley—and that, by itself, makes it kind of unwelcoming” Oh I forgot, us Asians don't when it comes to people of color or diversity.

https://medium.com/message/the-tech-diversity-story-thats-no... http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/...

You know, every day I feel like I'm told that I have to do something to help other people. There's always a cause. And you know, I'm not against that. I realize people have it rough. But there is this weird perception that Asian men have this amazing privilege in Western society and that we don't endure any racism or discrimination despite the fact that we still do.

They range from how we're depicted in the media, to whether we can achieve the highest levels of our profession (c-level, judges), to even whether women of other ethnicities find us attractive. It's also very easy to casually say something racist about Asians in popular media without the same recourse you'd get if you said something about blacks or jewish people. Growing up, I was picked on by white and black people for being Asian.

And I gotta say, no one gives a shit. No one.

The ones who care, are researchers who either write their findings, or Asian men who have the champion ourselves, such as Aziz Ansari who practically wrote a TV show about it. It's just like, "yeah well you don't have it as bad, so deal with it."

And so when I read articles that tell me that I as an Asian man have to help other ethnicities and that I have amazing privilege that I need to share with others, it irks me because I have to ask, who the hell helped me as an Asian man? Where were the articles about the racism that Asian men like myself experienced? Where are the people writing articles reversing their positions of the way they perceived Asians? Where are the non-Asians who are advocating for more Asians in various parts of society where we are under-represented? I'm just so ticked off by this double-standard.

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

#344

Post by emcq »

rntz wrote: post #339
Animats wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the same problem as women have in Silicon Valley. If you didn't spend a lot of time with computers on your own before college, you're not in the running. Up until 1985 or so, that wasn't the case, because few people had pre-college access to much CPU power. More women were going into computer science then.

Do you have anything more than anecdata for the idea that "If you didn't spend a lot of time with computers on your own before college, you're not in the running."? I've heard that idea in a lot of places, but it's never matched up with my personal experiences. I did my undergraduate at CMU, and plenty of the better programmers there I knew hadn't done any programming before they came to CMU. But of course, this too…

Ones man's anecdotes are anothers statistics. I haven't seen any data driven evidence for this, but let's use a thought experiment: would you expect it is more likely for professional athletes to come from a background of playing sports and being active from a young age?

I think most people would say yes except to play devil's advocate. Becoming a top caliber athlete requires years of conditioning, experience predicting trajectories of fast moving targets, ability to read your competitors, mental fortitude, flexiblity, and more. Why would we expect a field that prides itself with top caliber professionals in a competitive environment to be any different?

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

#345

Post by tantalor »

rntz wrote: post #339
Animats wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the same problem as women have in Silicon Valley. If you didn't spend a lot of time with computers on your own before college, you're not in the running. Up until 1985 or so, that wasn't the case, because few people had pre-college access to much CPU power. More women were going into computer science then.

Do you have anything more than anecdata for the idea that "If you didn't spend a lot of time with computers on your own before college, you're not in the running."? I've heard that idea in a lot of places, but it's never matched up with my personal experiences. I did my undergraduate at CMU, and plenty of the better programmers there I knew hadn't done any programming before they came to CMU. But of course, this too…

Two reasons,

1. CMU is the top CS school nationally; the basic quality of the education makes up for the lack of previous experience

2. CMU crafted a program specifically for students without previous experience to counter this effect; most schools do not

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

#346

Post by rustynails »

ryanlol wrote: post #61
pingou wrote: post #18

"as the only African American on her team, she didn’t feel she had much in common with her colleagues. “When I went out to lunch or something with my team, it was sort of like, ‘Soooo, what are you guys talking about?’ ” she says" I find this sentence really shocking, perhaps because I'm french and in France we try to assimilate people more (I don't really know), but I would definitely think that as a white software…

Would it be shocking if the roles were reversed? There's just as many racist black people as there are racist white people. edit: Am I wrong?

No, but two wrongs don't make a right. Also, as a society, we should be better than that.

I'll give you an example. Some of my friends made disparaging remarks about Muslims. I made it clear that was a generalisation and pointed out a (predominantly Australian) area with a lot of crime, "what about that? Is that any different?" I've slowly but surely educated good people to show more tolerance.

Having said that, I'll be the first to condemn inappropriate behaviour from a Muslim, Asian, white, feminist - I don't really care who. I don't have a PC bone in my body.

There are some great comments in this thread. The one I can least relate to is that we can't talk to people who listen to different music or watch different TV. Really? I was involved with an African woman, Asian, European, Australian. I have had mixed friends all my life. I never honed in on TV shows, but, I honed in on honesty, integrity, attitude (eg. I can't stomach arrogance, victim mentality and aggressive people). Is this so rare that people can converse beyond skin colour and gender?

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

#347

Post by serge2k »

pingou wrote: post #18

"as the only African American on her team, she didn’t feel she had much in common with her colleagues. “When I went out to lunch or something with my team, it was sort of like, ‘Soooo, what are you guys talking about?’ ” she says" I find this sentence really shocking, perhaps because I'm french and in France we try to assimilate people more (I don't really know), but I would definitely think that as a white software…

I wonder if any of the issues she faced were due to being female as well. Not exactly a great diversity story in that regard either. :/

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

#348

Post by cgy1 »

colmvp wrote: post #343
ebola1717 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://medium.com/message/the-tech-diversity-story-thats-no... http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/...

You know, every day I feel like I'm told that I have to do something to help other people. There's always a cause. And you know, I'm not against that. I realize people have it rough. But there is this weird perception that Asian men have this amazing privilege in Western society and that we don't endure any racism or discrimination despite the fact that we still do. They range from how we're depicted in the media, to…

Amen.

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

#349

Post by rntz »

emcq wrote: post #344
rntz wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have anything more than anecdata for the idea that "If you didn't spend a lot of time with computers on your own before college, you're not in the running."? I've heard that idea in a lot of places, but it's never matched up with my personal experiences. I did my undergraduate at CMU, and plenty of the better programmers there I knew hadn't done any programming before they came to CMU. But of course, this too…

Ones man's anecdotes are anothers statistics. I haven't seen any data driven evidence for this, but let's use a thought experiment: would you expect it is more likely for professional athletes to come from a background of playing sports and being active from a young age? I think most people would say yes except to play devil's advocate. Becoming a top caliber athlete requires years of conditioning, experience predict…

Are teachers, accountants, mathematicians, scientists, doctors, or lawyers known for practicing to get into their respective fields in elementary & middle school? Not so much. Even for the most demanding fields, we expect them to begin to specialize only in their high school years.

To my mind, the fields which are known for requiring training from childhood are sports and the performing arts (music, theatre).

And if I had to guess, I'd speculate this is less because it's intensely difficult to play sports or learn to play music, but because so few people can become professionally successful in these fields (there's only room for so many sports/music/film stars). CS doesn't have this problem (the demand for programmers is skyrocketing), so we shouldn't expect folks who learned to program in childhood to have any more than a mild-to-modest advantage.

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

#350

Post by lallysingh »

tantalor wrote: post #345
rntz wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have anything more than anecdata for the idea that "If you didn't spend a lot of time with computers on your own before college, you're not in the running."? I've heard that idea in a lot of places, but it's never matched up with my personal experiences. I did my undergraduate at CMU, and plenty of the better programmers there I knew hadn't done any programming before they came to CMU. But of course, this too…

Two reasons, 1. CMU is the top CS school nationally; the basic quality of the education makes up for the lack of previous experience 2. CMU crafted a program specifically for students without previous experience to counter this effect; most schools do not

Perhaps CMU's specializations could be applied to Howard?
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