81–90 of 190 posts
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Taking four paragraphs to get to your conclusion is a good tactic there. Because maybe by the end people will have forgotten that I'm not actually advocating judging people by their skin color.
It pains me that in 2011 I still have to explain you can't justify discrimination (of any type) with statistics.
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I'm actually one of these brown / "arab" new blacks you speak of incidentally (I'm from Algeria) and I haven't had this problem. But I do not have an accent and I've sort of "integrated" well within American culture. I can see where someone who is not so well-integrated and comes with an accent might see some trouble, but if they can code with quality and work in teams well, all that goes out the window.
In my experience once most middle eastern/arab people are "integrated", people see their appearance as vaguely mediterranean and don't really think twice about it.
a) Nobody knows or cares who wrote a piece of software, because 99.9% of the time, the customer never sees the photo of the author
b) If your software is super-hot and gaining a lot of traction and people are smelling the money, they will not care what colour you are
c) For those tiny number of people who don't have traction and want other peoples money, the colour of your skin may give you a disadvantage with some particular money givers, but it will give you an advantage with other money givers
In general, for the success of your product to be affected by peoples prejudices against you or the colour of your skin, you would have to belong to a very unlucky 99.99%. If that happens, well, bad luck, try again. That's what entrepreneurship is all about, isn't it?
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Agreed. Unless it's supported by a legal framework, racism is a self-defeating phenomenon. Racist individuals deprive themselves of the benefits offered by the group toward which they are racist, therefore making themselves less likely to succeed. If anything, a person or group of people being racist should alert you, the observant seizer of the day, to an under-utilized resource and/or market niche. So long as big b…
>Unless it's supported by a legal framework, racism is a self-defeating phenomenon. It's more complicated than that. Substitute legal framework with 'cultural normative behaviour' and we end up at a different position. I just highly doubt there's a lack of women or black people physically capable of being engineers.
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I see you're taking some heat for this comment, but I agree entirely. Trolling seems the more polite interpretation, because otherwise you'd be accusing somebody of levels of ignorance and arrogance that are mind-boggling to me. Racism does of course exist and is a problem. There's a ton of research on this. Here's a good place to start: http://www.projectimplicit.net/media.php http://www.projectimplicit.net/articles…
some sounded black and some sounded white. The research on what people name their children shows very little racial correlation after controlling for wealth. Though it does show high correlation with wealth and status. So showing a bias against names poor people choose regardless of race then claiming it is about blacks is poor form.
Yeah, some people are genuinely racist, but the fact is that most aren't. What most people incorrectly call "racism" is actually culture fit issues. When someone's culture is sufficiently different from yours, it becomes enough of an unknown to engender fear. And fear due to the unknown leads to paranoid thought, usually at the subconscious level. For example, if you get a job candidate whose demeanor screams "from t…
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I worked for 13 years doing phone based technical support. I can tell you that people with a strong accent are often seen as 'stupid'. I worked with several Indian co-workers and it wasn't unusual to have calls transferred to me (no accent) because people didn't want to talk to them. As a team lead I got to listen in to those calls, and it's amazing how badly one human being can treat another. There's the passive agg…
To a certain degree, what you're saying is even true among people in the US from different regions here. Put someone with a deep southern mountain accent and someone with a Brooklyn accent on the phone and they'll feel at odd with each other. Surveyed afterward, they will both probably feel the other is stupid and didn't understand them on simple things. I myself remember my first experience with someone at a call ce…
Did you just say "Delta Alpha..." or "D as in Delta, A as in Alpha"?
I can assure you the first one would confuse the hell out of most of the Indians(I am an Indian living in India).
Some of the NATO phonetic alphabets would complicate matters even further - Quebec, Zulu, Yankee. Zulu is a special one, considering Z isn't pronounced "Zee" in India(G is "Gee" and there is no "Zee") - it's called "Zed". So when you say "Zee" as in "Zulu", the support staff is going to have a hard time figuring out what on Earth was that. This is pure speculation - most likely support people undergo some training and they have a basic understanding of western accent and pronunciation.
The safer bet is simply saying the alphabets "Dee a vee eye dee", or better still use short, widely known words as mnemonics "D as in Doll, A as in Ant, V as in Van..."
I often have to resort to phonetic alphabets. Though sometimes it becomes problematic when the mnemonics I come up with confuse the support staff even more:
Me: "Dee..Ummmm Dee as in Dumbledore"
Support Staff: "????"
I am fed up with all the bla bla around this issue. Really. Look, if you think there is racism in the tech field (let us define this narrowly as prejudices against blacks; prejudices against Indians and Chinese are, I think, a bit different), stop writing cute, angry blog posts; instead write about what the solution is and what you are doing about it. That there are too few blacks in the tech industry is a fact. The…
"prejudices against Indians and Chinese are, I think, a bit different" - Please explain.
This entire issue is crap. I am a black programmer... I have no college education, came from single family home blah blah womp womp. I have launched 10+ projects for clients this year alone. I have 1 failed contract where I left because it just didn't work out. When I had success it was not because I was black and when I failed it was not because I was black. Both when I have succeeded and when I have failed was neve…
The racism that I've come in contact with (in corporate settings at least) is towards people from India. Not people born here and of Indian descent, but people from India with Indian culture. It would probably be better to call it "culturism" or bias against a culture instead of racism. When you go on a contract and you see 20 employees 50-80% of them being from India and 0% of them in management or even team lead po…
This entire issue is crap. I am a black programmer... I have no college education, came from single family home blah blah womp womp. I have launched 10+ projects for clients this year alone. I have 1 failed contract where I left because it just didn't work out. When I had success it was not because I was black and when I failed it was not because I was black. Both when I have succeeded and when I have failed was neve…
In corporate settings some of them banks I have come into contact with racism, sexism and age-ism against Blacks, Indians(both from India and from Native America), Jews, Mexicans, etc..the point of Feld's piece was that its alive in the infrastructure and only by shining the light of day on it will make it go away..