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100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

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Re: 100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

#111

Post by smtddr »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #90
smtddr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I downvoted your comment for the excessive negativity/abuse in it. You could have made your point just as clear without them. Second, I'm going to take your comment to point out something I've noticed when talking about sexism/racism. I'm going to call this theory of mine "Calibration". When I hear people say stuff like "What about letting [underrepresented group] choose what they want to do with their lives?"…

Re your footnote, I don't see how you can hold that belief.

Oh, I could be very wrong.

My own calibration settings for this is reading a bunch of comments on stormfront.org forums. While I dislike yummyfajitas's comments, they don't give me the same feeling I get from stormfront. I don't know what to think of him. Closest thing is perhaps super-insensitive, but I don't think he's oblivious to how people perceive his comments.... I dunno.

Re: 100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

#112

Post by FLUX-YOU »

dudul wrote: post #78
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You realize that most engineers do have a college degree right? You realize that most engineers are not dumb script kiddies who went through 10 PHP tutorials to learn how to code? This doesn't match the dialogue I see here and other places about college graduates and/or job candidates who can't fizzbuzz or have no other skills required in the industry. Although I think it would be nice if we simultaneously had a ste…

Not sure I see your point. Most "non-fizzbuzzers" are college graduates who got a liberal arts degree and are trying to pivot to a more lucrative field. Just to be clear: I don't think all developers need a degree, but I think there is much more than just attending a 4 week codecamp required to become a good developer. The author makes it sound so trivial and easy.

There was probably a bit of exaggeration about the pay but I don't think the author talked about engineer quality. He is not wrong that you can get some sort of position from attending a coding school though (maybe not just any coding school), but it probably won't be 100k and equity. Someone is willing to pay for what a coding school produces though and in my experience, not all jobs require good engineers. When weighed against the time and money spent on college with today's dubious outlooks on ROI, code camps are understandably worth a look even if you won't be a good engineer or making 100k at the end of it.

(as an aside, still waiting on Zed Shaw's boot camp destruction)

Re: 100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

#113

Post by yummyfajitas »

kasey_junk wrote: post #100
yummyfajitas wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how your post relates to mine. I'm hiring a data team. Based on the applicant pool it'll probably be me and 3 Punjabi males assuming I hire purely based on ability [1]. My claim is that I'll get no marginal value out of hiring a Maharashtrian, an African or a westerner over an equally qualified Punjabi. I provide no special western perspective on Kafka. I also don't know why it would be the "right thing…

You asked for how a diversity of thinking improves a company. A specific example of that is a more diverse workforce will be more inclusive at the funnel end of the hiring pipeline, making your applicant pool better. It doesn't matter that you provide no western perspective on Kafka. What matters is that your western perspective provides no negative impact to your ability to work on Kafka problems. If there were a sy…

Actually I said "I can't think of a single advantage beyond PR". You don't seem to disagree.

Re: 100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

#114

Post by b6 »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #79
b6 wrote: post #75

I would be overjoyed if people would stop capitalizing "black", "white", etc. It feels like I'm reading something from Stormfront. Do we want body attributes and tribes to be less important in the future, or more?

Do you seriously propose that ignoring tribes will help anything?

I don't think I'm proposing to ignore tribes. I'm calling tribes out as harmful. If people promote the old idea of declaring themselves distinct from the rest of the human family because of various body attributes, I'm going to oppose it.

Re: 100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

#115

Post by yummyfajitas »

phamilton wrote: post #105
yummyfajitas wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how your post relates to mine. I'm hiring a data team. Based on the applicant pool it'll probably be me and 3 Punjabi males assuming I hire purely based on ability [1]. My claim is that I'll get no marginal value out of hiring a Maharashtrian, an African or a westerner over an equally qualified Punjabi. I provide no special western perspective on Kafka. I also don't know why it would be the "right thing…

I think there are secondary effects. While technical expertise is probably not going to be affected, team dynamics will be affected through diversity in critical thinking and expression. That's not the same as race/gender/etc. Too much conformity within a team causes the team to embrace that common ground rather than embrace differences. I'm a fairly loud, direct person. I work with other loud and direct people. We a…

That's not the same as race/gender/etc.

No, it's not. Which is my point.

If you want to make the argument that racial/gender/etc groups think differently, be my guest - but that also implies that an unbiased hiring process might have disparate impact. E.g., if onion2k's hypothesis that women are more emotional than men is correct, then a hiring process aiming for rationalism might hire fewer women.

Re: 100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

#116

Post by yummyfajitas »

hluska wrote: post #108
yummyfajitas wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm familiar with orchestral blind auditions and the effect they had (though not from the article, my mom is a classical musician). I favor using blind auditions to eliminate bias. I favor the same in tech. My claim is that most activists in tech don't really believe that bias is the cause of underrepresentation here. As evidence for that, observe how few such activists actually favor purely meritocratic hiring.

Once again, have you even read the article that you pointed to? If so, what do you think about her plan to remove open source contributions from the hiring mix? She suggests that when hiring, employers should: a) Ask for code samples. b) Pair as an interview. c) Hire as a contractor before you make an offer of employment. She does not dispute the existence of bias, rather she makes the point that valuing open source…

(a) is an unbiased method analogous to blind orchestral auditions. (b) and (c) are not. (a) is also basically identical to hiring by github unless the candidate illegaly uses proprietary code as their sample. (From her article: "...not all programmers own the rights to their code..." in which case I can't look at it when hiring.)

The entire article is about how using github (i.e. evaluating code with the human absent, i.e. the closest thing [1] we currently have to blind auditions) is "biased" against women.

[1] Maybe we'll have something closer when starfighter comes out. I look forward to it.

Re: 100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

#117

Post by kasey_junk »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #113
kasey_junk wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You asked for how a diversity of thinking improves a company. A specific example of that is a more diverse workforce will be more inclusive at the funnel end of the hiring pipeline, making your applicant pool better. It doesn't matter that you provide no western perspective on Kafka. What matters is that your western perspective provides no negative impact to your ability to work on Kafka problems. If there were a sy…

Actually I said "I can't think of a single advantage beyond PR". You don't seem to disagree.

A better work environment for more of the employees and a wider applicant pool with more qualified applicants making it through the pipeline doesn't seem to be PR by my definition, but maybe if it is by yours, then I suppose we don't disagree.

Re: 100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

#118

Post by feybay »

punkbit wrote: post #25
yardie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we do need more black people in tech. And you get more black people in tech by having black people in tech. Going out to recruit, mentor, and support black tech candidates and workers. Seriously, the latest black YC candidate was a prison messaging service. More power to them but for a lot of blacks in the US the 2 paths that earn the most publicity are sports and criminal activity. Even when I was a teenager an…

What about letting kids choose what they want to do with their lives ? I used to be a music producer and learned everything by myself. I grown up in a white neighbourhood. I was the only emcee around, producing Hip-hop music, influenced by the Beastie Boys. I started coding really young. When I got the internet, I learned a lot about Hip-Hop, I was passionate. My first website was related about my passions, sharing m…

Firstly, I upvoted your account because you use logic and don't try to shut down discussion by whining that somebody is being to mean in a comment.

Secondly, this comment hit the nail on the head. Let kids pursue fields they are interested in, regardless of their race or sex. Don't hijack a person's career to serve your moral crusade.

Re: 100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

#119

Post by paulhauggis »

onion2k wrote: post #31
punkbit wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need more women, black, latino, white, red, green people in tech, we need talented people, regardless of how they look like. We need less bullshit, people who produce sane code and go home early to work on what matters about us, our communities, our families, our education! I'm full stack dev living in London, I'm black, huge afro, piercings, english is not my first language, skateboarder, into punk music, e…

I think you're both right and wrong. You're right in the sense that we do need to bring in the most talented people, but I suspect you're wrong in the definition of what the talents we need are. When people say "we need talented people" they usually mean that we need people who are best at doing what we do now. And that's not the solution, that's the problem . In order to improve society/business/whatever we have to…

"The thing that really must change in order to get society making the best tech possible that really impacts lives in a positive way is that we need to break the 'privileged white male' echo chamber that keeps coming up with the same dull ideas."

My problem with your post is that you stereotype white males and claim to want to get rid of stereotypes. You, yourself are concentrating on skin color, gender, and sexual preference when we need to be concentrating on the best person for the job regardless of any of these.

"That is best done by people who offer different perspectives on what we're doing at the moment. In the case of tech, that's women, ethnic minorities, LGBQT+, non-tech, etc"

Why do we need to single out all of these people and claim they are offering something "different"? Shouldn't we be fighting for equality and not special treatment for individual groups of people?

This isn't the first time I've seen this sort of thinking. I feel like many people are not fighting for equality, but for power and special laws/treatments for their specific group.

"In order to improve society/business/whatever we have to change it, and we can only change it by bringing in ideas that are different to what we have now. That is best done by people who offer different perspectives on what we're doing at the moment. In the case of tech, that's women, ethnic minorities, LGBQT+, non-tech, etc."

I disagree with most of this. Yes, to improve there needs to be changes, but these can come from anyone. Even though I'm not gay, I can still support gay rights.

We shouldn't require companies to hire anyone that is not qualified for a position. If there aren't enough qualified people of X group applying, then we need to figure out why and improve it (education, culture, etc).

Re: 100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley

#120

Post by dudul »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #112
dudul wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I see your point. Most "non-fizzbuzzers" are college graduates who got a liberal arts degree and are trying to pivot to a more lucrative field. Just to be clear: I don't think all developers need a degree, but I think there is much more than just attending a 4 week codecamp required to become a good developer. The author makes it sound so trivial and easy.

There was probably a bit of exaggeration about the pay but I don't think the author talked about engineer quality. He is not wrong that you can get some sort of position from attending a coding school though (maybe not just any coding school), but it probably won't be 100k and equity. Someone is willing to pay for what a coding school produces though and in my experience, not all jobs require good engineers. When wei…

The salary was an exaggeration, and really doesn't mean anything. What is $100k in SF? At the end of the day, aren't you better off making half that in a less expensive area?

What bothers me most is the idea that coding is just a random skill that anyone can pick up over a weekend just by reading an O'reilly book. There is a push to make coding look easy, "anyone can do it, why not you?" "Let's teach it at school, even a 4th grader can pick up python". The goal is clearly to increase the supply and help tech companies drag wages down. But coding is not easy.

I may be foolish but to me developer is a creative work, akin to writing a book, or a song, or painting. Not everyone is gonna be good at it. Would we say "yeah writing poetry is easy, just go to a poetry camp for 4 weeks"?

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