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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

#181

Post by pingou »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #125
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…

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 F…

Well it doesn't mirror my experience at all, at school or at work, but yes I'm pretty sure it does happen.

I didn't say there wasn't racism in France, more that the concept of belonging to a definite community depending on your color is probably less present as in the States.

The job application problem is a terrible one, as getting a job is the best way to use the social ladder.

That's the thing I don't understand, I thought capitalism only cared about money, if an Afro-French cannot find a job, surely it would be be advantageous to hire him, at a slightly lower market price. Still not good, but better than nothing, and once the minorities are in, we can expect the inequalities and hiring problems going away or at least being reduced with time...

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

#182

Post by Larrikin »

ryanlol wrote: post #123
Larrikin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Different races are exposed to different cultures and when everyone knows about some aspect and you don't, you will feel left out and experience culture shock.

My elementary school and middle school were about 95% black with rest mostly being white and my high school was about 85% white with the next largest percentage being Asian. The kinds of music, tv shows, and activities people did on the weekend had barely any overlap. Its not that those part of the culture are only for one race, or that you think one culture is better than another, its just what you are used to. I was exposed to and learn to like a lot of new things, but theres plenty I learned about and just didn't like. It just took time to figure those things out.

What bothered most of the other minority students the most is that just because we would sit together at lunch, somehow we were being racists, when in fact it was just wanting to talk about things that most of the other school had either no clue or no interest in talking about. It wasn't closed off, but usually the only people that would come sit at the "black" table were other students who had attended an inner city school like the rest of us.

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

#183

Post by auggierose »

ryanlol wrote: post #175
auggierose wrote: post #60

Let's assume there is this black guy / girl sitting in the interview room with you. You (white) are asking interview questions and you soon realise that the person you are interviewing is excellent. But something is off, you can't really put your finger on it. What do you do?

How does the color of the person affect this situation?

Good question, and my point is that most people don't ask themselves this question. There is probably nothing wrong with the candidate at all, the "off" you feel is just the different color.

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

#184

Post by pc86 »

scarmig wrote: post #94
taconacho wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that surprising. Howard University is 95% black (source: http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg01_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1024 " rel="nofollow">http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg01_tmpl... ) and is one of the lowest ranked colleges in terms of diversity. Coming from such a culturally closed-off environment to a different one comprised mostly of whites and Asians of different eth…

It'd be an irony if part of the reason students at HBCUs don't "mesh" with Silicon Valley is that they're not comfortable with diverse environments. Looking at a list of the "whitest" universities, their graduates seem similarly unrepresented in the places I've worked. A flawed but interesting test: do black CS graduates from Stanford and MIT fit better into SV than black CS graduates from Howard?

I don't know how you'd measure fit (tenure at first job? % that change jobs to another SV company?), but it should be pretty easy to get hiring numbers. Stanford might not be a good test simply because of proximity, but MIT certainly would be a contender.

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

#185

Post by bko »

geofft wrote: post #173
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #100

What a big steaming pile of political correctness. The author interviews a tiny handful of mediocre college students who blame their "color" for not getting hired right out of school by big, glamorous tech companies. Are we supposed to be sympathetic? I remember my own struggles to break into the tech business, many years ago now. Although white and "privileged", i.e. no cultural barriers to entry, I found it very to…

> What I do know is, you can't compensate for that by handing people undeserved opportunities. How do you know this? Not that I agree with your framing, but even if I accept it for the sake of argument, that black culture is lazy and underachieving in a way white culture isn't, it still seems to me that if you hand black people undeserved opportunities (leaving aside that the word "undeserved" is a huge stretch here,…

Not OP, but giving false promise to people is very cruel. A lot of people who do not get into schools on their own merits (for whatever reason) do not do as well. The drop out rate among African Americans is significantly higher. This may be because of the colleges attended, but even in the same college, these differences remain. This doesn't necessarily mean that its caused by different standards for different races. For instance it may be because some students have trouble fitting in or finding the support they need. But it is worth considering.

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

#186

Post by panglott »

pingou wrote: post #126
joslin01 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

White/black cultural differences in the US is a different issue from immigrant assimilation. Because black people are already "real Americans", and yet overall are culturally distinct from white Americans in some ways.

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

#187

Post by alistproducer2 »

I'm a black guy working in IT at a company in the top 5 of the Fortune 500. This is complicated issue. There have been experiment that show having a "black" name lowers your job prospects [1]. Other studies that show:

"...race actually turned out to be more significant than a criminal background. Notice that employers were more likely to call Whites with a criminal record (17% were offered an interview) than Blacks without a criminal record (14%). [2]"

So all the people acting as though our society is some meritocratic, utopia can keep that bullsh*t to themselves.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that blacks under-perform relative to whites when it comes to academics. There are obvious reason for this, but those reasons don't change the truth. Companies that are heavy on the engineering are going to use academic markers to try and select the best of the best. There aren't enough blacks >= white peers in the top percentiles of CS to give us proportional representation.

[1] http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html [2] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/04/03/race-crimina...

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

#188

Post by rhino369 »

MollyR wrote: post #17
gtk40 wrote: post #5

It'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.

Yea. I don't like the way they use it. Asians and Indians get considered white if they don't fit in the specific narrative, an author wants to tell. I also don't like the idea, that liking pokemon or star wars makes you "white". There is something wrong with this,I can't seem to put into words.

Americas views on race are very weird. Race is a social construct. It was essentially a binary view on race. There were blacks and then everyone else. Thats why you could marry Mexicans or Indians but not blacks in many states, historically, if you were white.

This changed when Americas immigration opened up to people from Asia and get central.

But as those groups assimililate we are going to revert to the old style view of race. Black and then everyone else.

So when people say white culture they really just mean mainstream American culture.

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

#190

Post by Yaziyumaru »

qaq wrote: post #120
Yaziyumaru wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is true, I went to a very small not well known college in Canada and a classmate of mine went straight to Google after finishing his CS degree. Good companies generally hire off of provable skills not "how early" you started learning.

Which parts are not true: 1) Majority of employees at Google FB etc are graduates of top tech schools. 2) Majority of employees started coding and had interest in CS before college. How likely you are to be good at CS if you never had an interest in CS before college :)? I have a lot of friends from Easternn Europe now working at Google, Apple, FB, but this anecdotal evidence does not change the fact that majority of…

It might be true that the majority are coming out of top tech schools, I really have no way of knowing that. However, I'm skeptical about how important the school is to Google as an employer given their rigorous screening process. Coming from a top tech school certainly can't hurt but I don't believe the school you go to necessarily dictates what quality of engineer you are, though it can increase your opportunities for sure.

On the second point, I think interest prior to University is certainly helpful but saying it's a majority is just an anecdotal conjecture itself.

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