A good article with a horrible, clickbaity headline. Howard's CS department head and even the students seem fully aware that "the problem" doesn't lie in evil Silicon Valley HR departments, but in the challenges of preparing kids who haven't coded until college.
Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
121–130 of 497 posts
Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
"it struck her as a startlingly homogeneous culture, made up of white and Asian people who “like Star Wars and stuff like Pokémon.” When companies began to visit Howard, they’d boast about having on-site playground equipment and volleyball courts—not the kind of thing Jones or her friends got excited about. “Slides are not really appealing,” she says. “There are not a lot of people of color in the Valley—and that, by…
> like Star Wars and stuff like Pokemon What an amazingly stupid generalization. Some of my favorite Pokemon and video game youtubers are black. Tons of black Star Wars fans exists too. It's pretty offensive to associate an entire group of people with certain preferences.
And by the same token, not all white guys are into Star Wars and Pokemon and roller blading. The Bloomberg blogger is guilty of a lot of stereotyping.
Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
#123Earlier 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.
But thats not what the article said. >“It could be something as simple as, like, what they watch on TV or what kind of books they like to read. And those are just not TV shows that I watch or books that I read.” It didn't say she thought those were books and TV shows that only people of other races like.
Yeah, but that's not related to the race aspect. Why bring up her race unless that's the reason for why they don't watch the same TV shows or read the same books?
Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
May be because it's much harder for startups to sponsor visas, and they don't have oversea offices to transfer people from?
Yes, this is the main reason. A startup is a much larger gamble for someone on a visa.
I'd think it runs the other way: a visa is a much larger gamble for someone running a startup.
Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
#125"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…
This is not my experience in France at all. I'm a white American male, and I was shocked when I worked in France for a month. When I ate lunch in the cafeteria the muslim employees grouped together and there was a whole 'who are you eating with' question that I found odd.
This was in 2004, and it is only 1 data point. But when talking to French friends of mine in tech who are African they share similar stories. One French friend of mine could not find a job in tech until he changed his name to a generic French one. He sent out over 20 job applications and didn't get an interview until he changed his name. After he changed his name he got an interview after the first attempt.
These are only anecdotes, and I can't offer any hard evidence, but I would not suggest that France is somehow 'post-racial'.
Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
#126"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…
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 the same degree as in the US, but I may be mistaken).
I wasn't talking about tourists, we are well known for behaving badly with them, sorry about that.
What shocks me is not that she doesn't feel she has a lot in common with her colleagues, but that she thinks that it's because she's black and they're not.
Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
#127It's interesting that it describes Silicon Valley as being too white, when it seems like there are quite a few Asians. Even working elsewhere, a high percentage of our programmers are Asian, higher than the metro's demographics would suggest.
Yes, and when you break down the "white" demographic, you'll find yourself surprised at the rather high representation of Ashkenazis.
Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
#128Computer 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 millions of test results: http://i.imgur.com/zB1oENS.png?1 There are very simply very few black people in the far-right portion. This is not even a disputed fact (the dispute is mainly over why the curve is skewed and if it can be fixed; the existence of the skew is incontrovertible).
This was at least partly because of the way companies recruited: From 2001 to 2009, more than 20 percent of all black computer science graduates attended an historically black school, according to federal statistics—yet the Valley wasn’t looking for candidates at these institutions.
The average SAT scores at Howard are thoroughly mediocre, on par with second and tier state colleges, and you would not expect an elite school to concentrate on Howard, any more than you would expect it to concentrate on Southern Illinois University or the like. The only reason an elite company would recruit at Howard is for diversity reasons.
Foreman is strong-willed, which sometimes gets him in trouble. “I just chalked it up to soft skills, I guess,” he says, explaining that he and his interviewer had clashed. Pratt says he’d been “furious” to learn that Foreman had been passed over. Other companies said no, too.
So was he a good programmer or not? How do we the readers know that he good do the job and was passed up unfairly?
The phenomenon, “stereotype threat,” is getting more attention in the Valley, and companies have begun training employees to be aware of it.
The idea of stereotype threat is extremely dubious - http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-list-on-virtual-none...
“She doesn’t fit the profile of what people think of when they think of engineers. Even though people think of Silicon Valley as a big meritocracy, I don’t think that’s how it works.”
There are now a number of companies that do automated programming interviews -- Starfighter, Hacker Rank, etc. Do these manage to overcome stereotype threat? Do these blind interviews allow through more African-Americans? Before throwing around slanderous accusations, one should actually show that Silicon Valley is treating people with the same programming ability differently.
The sad thing is that these tech companies cannot just admit, "We don't recruit at Howard because the SAT scores are not there." Rather these companies have to pretend that anyone can be a great programmer if they just put in the work, and a lot of people end up with false hopes that only get crushed.
Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 1990? Likely. In 2010? This article is supposed to be about US, not a third-world country, right?
Did you not realize that US education is on par with a third world country in a lot of regions?
Access to a computer has little to do with education anymore. If someone wants to tinker with computers, they can use one in a library or just get an old one for <$100.
Re: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think its kinda ridiculous to say that to be 'SV material' you need to have started studying CS before college
Perhaps, but since you have more than enough candidates who did start way before college, it's not unreasonable to priorities hiring them.
Something like that seems so easy to fake. If you have the knowledge now, how is anyone going to prove you wrong if you say you learned it at 13?