Silicon Valley Is Using Trade Secrets to Hide Its Race Problem
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Re: Silicon Valley Is Using Trade Secrets to Hide Its Race Problem
#2Mathematically, not all companies can have a higher proportion of $GROUP than the industry as a whole. So if companies advertise and compete on having a higher-than-industry-average proportion of $GROUP, they paint a target on their back.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using Trade Secrets to Hide Its Race Problem
#3I find it a little absurd to compare the SV demographics to the US demographics, and then claiming that the problem is with SV's hiring.
It's a US problem that its society has failed to push the minorities up with better welfare and education; it just manifests itself as lower representation in SV.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using Trade Secrets to Hide Its Race Problem
#4I don't really see how diversity is tech's problem any more than it's hospitals' problem. If you want more engineers from more underrepresented groups you need to educate them. If there aren't enough doctors of group X it's not the fault of hospitals. It's the fault of society for not facilitating more of them going into medicine. It seems to me that the case for tech workers is analogous.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using Trade Secrets to Hide Its Race Problem
#5This is such fake news. I've been surrounded by H1B employees my entire career.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using Trade Secrets to Hide Its Race Problem
#6I don't really see how diversity is tech's problem any more than it's hospitals' problem. If you want more engineers from more underrepresented groups you need to educate them. If there aren't enough doctors of group X it's not the fault of hospitals. It's the fault of society for not facilitating more of them going into medicine. It seems to me that the case for tech workers is analogous.
100% agree. Look at the diversity of CS courses at top universities. If minorities and females are not represented there then how can you expect companies who hire top talent to have them?
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using Trade Secrets to Hide Its Race Problem
#7More like journalism is using race to hide its jealousy problem. Tech now has the power, influence, and compensation that journalist used to have, and they're mad about it. Most of these companies go way out of their way to recruit minorities and women. If you believe that not having enough of them in tech companies is a problem, you're going to have to look further down the funnel, to college major choices and honestly probably much earlier. These groups are simply not graduating with CS degrees or programming skills in the numbers necessary to be equally represented as employees at these companies. Whether that's because of discrimination at earlier stages or simple preference, fixing it at the level of hiring for tech companies is way way too late to improve anything. By then it's a completely zero-sum problem. There are only so many viable candidates from these groups with the requisite skills, if Google hires one, that's one less that Palantir can take. It's just a silly game of musical chairs until we fix the pipeline problem, which is that there are not enough viable candidates from these groups. Once that is fixed, then if companies are still not hiring them, let's talk about that, but I very much doubt that will be the case.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using Trade Secrets to Hide Its Race Problem
#8For the millionth time. The distribution of populations not lining up with the general population distributions is not indicative of discrimination. Not to mention that the "anti-brown people" narrative absolutely dissolves in the face of the massive overrepresentation of Indians and other Asians. To say that Silicon Valley has a "race problem" and only include the employment statistics as they relate to the population at large is just pure insanity. What about the racial distribution of the hiring pool? It's less diverse by their own standards than the distributions in companies. What about the racial distribution of college graduates in engineering? Then what about mapping the racial distribution of the college graduates onto interview success rates, where the biased distribution of the graduates as produced by the universities' affirmative action policies must necessarily align with a similar policy at the company if their own filtering criteria is to produce the same results?
The thing that I find the most interesting about all of this is that there isn't an overt attempt to actually remove purported discrimination from the hiring process. Suggestions to anonymize the interview process typically produce results that are even less representative of their desired distribution, because almost every company is actively discriminating in favor of women and "marginalized communities." If their accusations were actually on the basis of correcting bias/discrimination, this is the sort of strategy you'd see advocated, but it's not. They want arbitrary quotas that are, given the available pool of candidates to even consider, mathematically impossible to attain.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using Trade Secrets to Hide Its Race Problem
#9If lack of diversity isn't a problem, why aren't these companies open with their figures? Why go to such extents? There's also research to suggest women and minorities are underpaid relative to their male, white counterparts, shouldn't companies fix that?
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using Trade Secrets to Hide Its Race Problem
#10More like journalism is using race to hide its jealousy problem. Tech now has the power, influence, and compensation that journalist used to have, and they're mad about it. Most of these companies go way out of their way to recruit minorities and women. If you believe that not having enough of them in tech companies is a problem, you're going to have to look further down the funnel, to college major choices and hones…
Would you be willing to share your ideas on what can be done at the beginning of the pipeline?