To make a specific point, without prejudice to the main points of the blog post:
>One of the open secrets of working in technology is that technical interviews are completely worthless as a predictor for whether someone is a good hire or not.
[...]
>> We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship.
> It’s amazing to think that Google found zero relationship between an interviewer saying “Hire” and whether the candidate was actually a good hire or not.
The fact [the scores of someone who gets hired] are not predictive of their eventual performance, does not mean that hiring process is completely random, or worthless.
In order to tell that, you would need to look at the cohort of people who were 'no hire' and compare them to the 'hire' cohort; it's not enough to just look within the 'hire' cohort.
In other words, the hiring process is (1) designed to be a Classifier, typically tuned with an emphasis on having a low false positive rate.
Hoping that (2) the scores of the small subset of candidates who are classed 'hire', also act well as a regression to the candidate's eventual performance, is a big additional ask.
Just because there is evidence that (2) is untrue, or particularly noisy, does not necessarily mean that (1) is broken.
I don't see a great way of solving this, without a large company like Google also randomly hiring 'no hires' from different stages in their hiring process (and subsequently measuring their performance) in order to quantify the performance of subsequent steps in the hiring process - not aware of anyone who has done that; it would be really interesting to read how a company who does that gets on, but an expensive experiment.
>One of the open secrets of working in technology is that technical interviews are completely worthless as a predictor for whether someone is a good hire or not.
This is wrong. Apparently google has internally done much research and their interview techniques have strong collreation to success on the job.
> The fact [the scores of someone who gets hired] are not predictive of their eventual performance, does not mean that hiring process is completely random, or worthless.
It does not automatically mean this, but it is a strong indicator. If the output of the classifier is not correlated with a given output sample it is reasonable to assume, in the absence of other data, that it is uncorrelated for other samples as well.
It is possible. Check out the difference between a concurrent and predictive validity study. Also, range restriction corrections can approximate the unrestricted population variance and validity coefficient.
> it's not enough to just look within the 'hire' cohort.
Enough for what? Why not? They specifically have a "score", not just a hire / no hire decision. Sure it would be better, but you don't make any convincing argument why their analysis is not valuable.
> designed to be a Classifier, typically tuned with an emphasis on having a low false positive rate.
classifier of what? Why is classifier capitalized? I don't think so.
That points to some aspect (not race) of African-Americans that cause them not to excel. Is it broken families or a culture of not "acting white"? (acting white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white)
Those things needs to be dealt with on a community level, a band aid and a few initiatives by tech companies won't solve anything properly.
You have to hit the whole pipeline, starting from k-12, and going all the way up through senior promotions. You have to think about which companies you do M&A work on, where you source in the world, and how you're going to engage with HBCUs and others.
Most importantly, you have to take action, and not just talk and write about it.
You have to change internal cultures. You have to recognize the biases and buzzwords such as "we don't want to lower the bar". You have to remind yourself that not too long ago, programming was something that very smart people, trained in many different things, engaged in as a side thing, not as a primary thing, and that's what's built our current industry.
meh, it's a lot of work, and will take many more years of concerted effort.
One of the key sources of this difference is whether you count "Information" degrees as CS. My number doesn't include information degrees and yours does.
"I looked into it and it seems even after all these years the best way to get into Microsoft’s internship program is if your school is on the list of schools the company formally recruits from."
This isn't unusual for technology companies. It isn't even unusual for research labs[1]. So, basically, the company has delegated its hiring diversity to a university admissions department. Worse, many universities only accept people into their graduate program from certain other universities. I've never heard of a recruiter from any of these golden schools visiting anywhere near me[4]
Add to this ageism that is prevalent in technology and you have a the makings of lip service.
Why is ageism problematic? Many minorities, particularly enrolled members of Native American tribes, go to school later than their white or Asian[2] counterparts. Many go into the military or need the extra time to sort themselves out. They typically go to a community college first (different path from average), then go to a university[3].
The school I went to was on Microsoft's list to hire only support people from. IBM didn't have that hangup and got one of the best developers I've ever known and it worked out fine for them.
I would love to see these companies be a little wider with the hiring net, but I don't believe it will happen. They'll wring their hands and talk and release reports[5], but it won't change a thing because they don't get the basic problems.
1) in my youth I was refused for a summer internship because my high school and college were in the same area code....
2) seems Asian isn't considered much except in the reverse of requirements - see the lawsuits against the California university system by Asian students
3) I'll leave the discussion on scholarships and students lying to get scholarships directed at certain minorities for a different time
4) hell, when I was applying in 1987, I had to travel to get the applications, pay the fees with money I really could have used, and never get a reply. Someone told me it was because, like everyone on the reservation I was from, I had used a post office box for my address. That seemed a bit far fetched to me.
5) I'll believe something might change when I see "enrolled tribal members" listed on their reports and a list of schools that includes ones that actually care about recruiting in diverse areas.
I don't know that ageism in technology necessarily means that older students are less likely to be hired out of university. I would be interested in seeing data to support that.
As an anecdote, I have observed older students that attend the "right" school and achieve high grades are highly sought after by companies.
One critical point I feel this piece does not touch on is how diversity of experience is great in the workplace. It's a huge benefit as a developer (and obviously other professions too) to work on teams with people who have lived very different lives. The Mirrortocracy[0] covers this well, but it should be clear to us all that being exposed to different views helps refine our ideas and process.
It's partly up to us to make diversity happen. We can prioritize offers that have diverse teams, and when we get a chance to hire to value diversity of experience.
I absolutely agree, though I always feel like culture and nationality are very underplayed in this discussion - I believe an American, an Eastern European and a Chinese national would bring a lot more diverse world views to the table than a female and a male American (or black and white).
> It's a huge benefit as a developer (and obviously other professions too) to work on teams with people who have lived very different lives.
I can see how that would be true for some types of development, but there are also many type for which I don't see offhand how it would matter.
For instance, if I were doing web design for my employer's shopping cart site I could see how having a diverse team could greatly help because the team would have people on it that are part of or identify with more of our customer demographics.
I as a white male mid-50s atheist tall fat guy could easily inadvertently come up with a design that might turn off non-whites, females, young people or elderly people, religious people, short people, or skinny people. Even if I don't end up doing something to offend people, I could simply miss opportunities that people of other backgrounds might see.
In fact, I've seen that kind of thing. I saw a company that was making CD-ROM caching software in the '90s find a nice cluster of sales when an employee who was also a Mormon pointed out that this software worked extremely well with the CD-ROM genealogy databases that were becoming quite popular among Mormons. Without that Mormon employee, they would have probably never noticed that Mormons could be a distinct market segment for this product that was worth specifically targeting.
What I actually work on, though, is backend stuff like processing orders and subscription billing, interfacing to payment processors, reporting sales tax in the US and VAT in Europe, analyzing A/B tests, and so on. Would having a diverse team working on this actually produce any different results?
Wouldn't "companies passing on highly qualified candidates due to a broken process" be a self-correcting problem, where other market players with non-broken hiring processes would be able to scoop the talent up and gain a competitive advantage?
Over time, I imagine this will self-correct. For the last decade or so the popular thing has been to copy Google's interviewing/hiring process because everyone wanted to be Google(in terms of engineering notoriety, not product/industry). It seems like that is beginning to fade out of popularity a bit though.
> This is where I’ll talk about the Big Lie from the title of my post. That lie is that there is some sort of pipeline problem preventing tech companies from hiring more black people. The reality is that tech companies shape the ethnic make up of their employees based on what schools & cities they choose to hire from and where they locate engineering offices.
I agree this is a substantial part of the problem, particularly in larger corporations where they do target specific cities/schools.
However, I'm not sure I can agree with the implication you should locate engineering offices based on the demographics as its the only way to fix the "cities where they locate their engineering offices". Demographic/diversity shouldn't be a criteria for office location.
You shouldn't have to move your entire organization just because the city you happen to be in is ~5% Black and the largest minorities happen to be Asian or Hispanic.
For instance at $Day_Job, the floor I'm on is 25% Asian, 5% Hispanic, 5% Black, 65% White. That is pretty much +/- 5% of the actual demographics.
I wouldn't argue we lack diversity because we just follow the local demographics. I'd say the problem is when you are so out of whack with the local demographics it becomes absurd. For instance, an office in Atlanta that is 90% white.
> tech companies shape the ethnic make up of their employees based on what schools & cities they choose to hire from
I wonder if even that is true for California tech companies. California cities feature a diversity which is absent from their local tech companies.
California's tech companies appear to be here for the VC money, not the local labor pool. California's schools, by and large, do not output a globally competitive workforce. The tech workforce is mostly brought in from somewhere else.
And California's government doesn't seem to care about the demographic mismatch.
While there is more than adequate evidence of racism in tech hiring, it would be useful if articles like this included the expected percentage of X engineers if there were no bias in the hiring process.
E.g. if the expected percentage of black engineers if there were no bias in the hiring process was 2%, that seems like important information to include.
Something the author hints at is that the big discrepancy is geographic in nature, not racial. The geographic discrepancy manifests itself in not enough blacks getting hired.
Let me put it bluntly: I grew up in the rural south. I NEVER meet other programmers who have a background remotely similar to mine, ever.
When was the last time you worked with a coder who grew up in a place that wasn't a wealthy suburb or a nice city?
How many people who grew up in trailer parks work at Google or Apple?
The author is right: not enough black folks at these companies. What is sad is that this is a symptom of the real issue, which is socioeconomic and geographic in nature, and the companies trying to do something about it are only focusing on the symptoms.
This means that even companies like Apple will never fully address the underrepresented groups. America doesn't have a race problem, so much as a culture problem. Obviously culture is extremely aligned with race, but think about it this way: the geographical and socieconomic layers that are excluded by these tech companies are filled with people of all colors, and nobody gives a shit about the people that look too similar to the white folks from wealthy cities that have every advantage.
It's also curious that everything that ever seems to be published on diversity - especially in technology - seems to focus either on the percentage of representation of black people or the percentage of representation of women. I guess this author focused on the percentage of representation of black people because he's black, and that impacts him, but just anecdotally based on the 25 years I've been doing this, I'd say that Indian people (men and women) are vastly overrepresented as a percentage of the tech workforce. Is that due to racial preferences for Indian people? Articles like this would seem to draw that conclusion - either the underrepresentation of black people is not due to racism or the overrepresentation of Indian people must be, correct? I also find it interesting that people are studying, say, the representation by gender and race but not, say, religion - how under/over represented are Jewish people or Muslim people in technology? Are there biases there?
To really understand if companies are biased or not, you also need to know the percent of applicants to these companies who are black. If only 2% of applicants to Google are black, I would expect only 2% of new hires at Google to be black.
The assumption that a white applicant and a black applicant should be roughly equal is a strong prior. I would need to see convincing data to counteract this assumption.
Absolutely, this is rather the point of the article: that diversity efforts focused on eliminating bias during selection are pointless unless you also ensure a diverse candidate pool to begin with.
I empathize with the author's frustration but there were many parts of the article which I found troubling:
> "I also quickly learned that hiring managers for “good internships” don’t come to black colleges looking for interns regardless of how good the students are."
I've never met anyone who didn't claim that their colleges is full of good students. There seems to be a heavy bias here - everyone has a rosy opinion of their own college, but clearly, companies can't go to every single one. If you feel that X college, whether it's a HBU, state-college, community-college, or code-camp, is great enough to be shortlisted over other alternatives, you really need to make a compelling case for this, using data. Just saying that Microsoft doesn't recruit from the college you used to attend, and therefore, they are being unfair/stupid, doesn't sound like a great argument.
> In one of the most reasonably-priced major cities of America, a ten-minute walk from one of the world’s top ten engineering schools, Google has an office. There were once dozens of SWEs and SREs in this office, humming along, cranking out GWT, nerd shit etc. Google decided to close Atlanta engineering
Again, this sounds exactly like the point above about colleges. There are ~30 major cities in America, and Google can't open significant dev-centers in every one of them. If you think that ATL would provide great value for Google along all axes (not just diversity), you need to make a compelling case for it. Just stating that Google doesn't have a major office in ATL, and therefore they are being unfair/stupid, isn't a great argument.
> There were also the Hiring Committee meetings that became contentious when I advocated for diverse candidates. Candidates who were dinged for not being fast enough to solve problems, not having internships at ‘strong’ companies and who took too long to finish their degree. Only after hours of lobbying would they be hired.
> when tech companies talk about “lowering the bar” by hiring minorities they are actually just saying they don’t want to hire minorities since no one in tech actually has a bar that works very well in determining good versus bad hires regardless of ethnicity or gender.
This was the part I actually found most troubling. Google has an extremely high rejection rate - a large majority of their candidates end up getting rejected for "not being fast enough, not having strong internships" or for any number of other reasons. When the average Joe gets rejected for the above reasons, it's ok, but when a diversity candidate gets rejected for the same reasons, it's suddenly a problem?
And what exactly is the author advocating when he talks about how interviews are useless, and therefore, there's no point in having a bar at all? It just sounds like the author is saying that there's no way of figuring out who's going to be a great candidate, and therefore, you might as well just set some minimum qualifications, and then hire anyone who meets those minimum qualifications and happens to be a diversity-candidate. It's arguments like this that make people think that diversity == lowering-the-bar. Yes, hiring is extremely hard, but no, that doesn't mean it can be skipped or watered down. Every successful company needs to figure out some heuristic that will allow them to hire only the best candidates, and any diversity push needs to be made while still respecting this stringent heuristic. If you think that Google's heuristic in unfairly biased against diversity candidates, in a way that's unrelated to job performance, you really need to provide evidence for this. Simply saying that Google rejected some diversity candidates because they didn't pass their evaluation-process, is a really weak argument.
Overall, I agree with the author's thesis that the interviewing process is biased in many ways (race, gender, age, height, charisma, eloquence, etc etc), and that we need to do more to fix these problems. But the arguments he presents are so weak, and the insults he piles on MS/GOOG/FB are so unfair, that I find myself disagreeing with most of what he says.
I'm honestly confused by your response. Companies like Facebook, Twitter & Google hire 1% blacks in tech and 2% overall. Blacks as a percentage of college graduates in engineering or non-engineering fields are way more than 2% of graduating classes.
However most Silicon Valley tech companies under-hire from this demographic for their own reasons.
Even if Blacks get CS/Engineering degrees, they can still be less competent than Asians/Whites. Tech companies attract the most talented people (e.g. Google gets millions of job applications per year) and they can pick those who are the most competent/best in class. Those are usually Asians and Whites. For example, if 10% of all CS degree holders are Black, you can't expect that there will be 10% of Blacks at tech companies.
It's quite surprising to me that Apple seems to be doing so much better at diversity hiring. I think Google, Facebook, and Twitter are quite serious with respect to diverse hiring / I find it hard to believe Apple's methods wouldn't be found out and copied by any of them if they worked so much better.
Has anyone looked into the possibility that rather than Apple being uniquely good at diversity hiring, Apple is just uniquely good at gerrymandering their diversity report?
In Apple's 2014 EEO-1 they distinguish between professionals and technicians. Professionals are 1.7% black and technicians are 11.3% black. I assume both of these are lumped into a single "tech workforce" number.
Did we read the same post? The whole point is that they are not actually serious. There is a lot of lip service, but then diverse candidates in practice are stonewalled at every step: by location, by academic background, during evaluation etc.
If they were serious, they could look beyond their institutionally-placed (and fairly arbitrary, let's say it) obstacles, like Apple did for his friend; but they won't, which means they are not serious.
I'm sorry but I get bothered by the current national focus on rewarding or advantaging diversity based on arbitrary traits such as skin color and gender.
I'm 5'8 and male. Height tends to correlate to success and salary. Should I receive special treatment because of my disadvantage? Perhaps a certain ratio of company board members should be required to be under a certain height threshold.
I've also been bald since I was 18, a trait I have no control over, but which likely led to some lost opportunities (with the opposite sex at least). Do I deserve something special for that?
Companies should hire on the basis of merit, not skin color or sex.
I did undergrad EE/CS at Illinois/Urbana and I don't recall any blacks in any of my classes at all.
I've worked at high tech firms and never see black programmers/engineers.
I've worked for a Wall Street bank and never saw black programmers/engineers.
I've been to many tech Meetups and conferences and other conferences where software plays a major role but I've almost never seen black engineers/computer scientists.
Some of the meetups / conferences I see few women, but I do see women in the aggregate, but almost never blacks and I'm in NYC where there are many blacks.
I've been to Google Tech talks in the Google building in NYC yet never see blacks.
Since the meetups don't require you go to "the right school" etc. and are free to attend it shows that there just are that many blacks that seem to be interested.
Computer software and hardware are those areas where competence is extremely important. Hire on merit, not on other indicators.
As someone who grew up poor (albeit white), I'm going to try to explain a core problem to you - role models.
When I looked at the adults around me growing up, I didn't see educated people. The responsible adult professionals were motorcycle mechanics, truck drivers, stuff like that. The less responsible were day laborers or petty criminals. The only people I encountered who were educated were teachers and doctors, and the wealthy men my father often worked for whom he condescendingly called "edjicated mow-rawns" in his thick Kentucky drawl. What I knew of success was seething class resentment.
I don't think I knew a single adult who was an engineer or technical professional. But I was clever, and read a lot of science fiction. I was originally interested in automotive/motorcycle engineering, having grown up around racing. But I discovered computers in high school, and that was that.
The boundaries we can imagine are limited by our childhood experiences. If you grow up wealthy and privileged, surrounded by doctors and lawyers and executives, you expect adulthood to look like that. If you grow up in a world where the only adults you know are hustlers and criminals, that's what you can imagine.
So why aren't there more black engineers? In part, because there aren't black engineers. And what black engineers there are, are underemployed, because they didn't necessarily go to the elite schools or have the other earmarks of privilege.
Fixing this is going to take more than the myth of rugged individualism.
How many events have you attended as the only white person?
How comfortable did you feel?
Do you think your merit was accurately reflected at these events?
So the lack of black participation in free tech events === lack of interest from black people? That's a stretch of a conclusion rife with confounding variables.
[+] [-] feral|9 years ago|reply
>One of the open secrets of working in technology is that technical interviews are completely worthless as a predictor for whether someone is a good hire or not. [...]
>> We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship.
> It’s amazing to think that Google found zero relationship between an interviewer saying “Hire” and whether the candidate was actually a good hire or not.
The fact [the scores of someone who gets hired] are not predictive of their eventual performance, does not mean that hiring process is completely random, or worthless.
In order to tell that, you would need to look at the cohort of people who were 'no hire' and compare them to the 'hire' cohort; it's not enough to just look within the 'hire' cohort.
In other words, the hiring process is (1) designed to be a Classifier, typically tuned with an emphasis on having a low false positive rate. Hoping that (2) the scores of the small subset of candidates who are classed 'hire', also act well as a regression to the candidate's eventual performance, is a big additional ask.
Just because there is evidence that (2) is untrue, or particularly noisy, does not necessarily mean that (1) is broken.
I don't see a great way of solving this, without a large company like Google also randomly hiring 'no hires' from different stages in their hiring process (and subsequently measuring their performance) in order to quantify the performance of subsequent steps in the hiring process - not aware of anyone who has done that; it would be really interesting to read how a company who does that gets on, but an expensive experiment.
[+] [-] dominotw|9 years ago|reply
This is wrong. Apparently google has internally done much research and their interview techniques have strong collreation to success on the job.
[+] [-] vonmoltke|9 years ago|reply
It does not automatically mean this, but it is a strong indicator. If the output of the classifier is not correlated with a given output sample it is reasonable to assume, in the absence of other data, that it is uncorrelated for other samples as well.
[+] [-] chewyshine|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rando289|9 years ago|reply
Enough for what? Why not? They specifically have a "score", not just a hire / no hire decision. Sure it would be better, but you don't make any convincing argument why their analysis is not valuable.
> designed to be a Classifier, typically tuned with an emphasis on having a low false positive rate.
classifier of what? Why is classifier capitalized? I don't think so.
[+] [-] jimmywanger|9 years ago|reply
Most blacks that are recent African immigrants tend to do very well. http://www.atlnightspots.com/african-immigrants-have-the-hig...
That points to some aspect (not race) of African-Americans that cause them not to excel. Is it broken families or a culture of not "acting white"? (acting white: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_white)
Those things needs to be dealt with on a community level, a band aid and a few initiatives by tech companies won't solve anything properly.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] exolymph|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] williamaadams|9 years ago|reply
Diversity hiring is challenging. Lots of pitfalls, minefields, and social cruft to get through.
Here's my effort to improve things at Microsoft: http://www.industryexplorers.com
You have to hit the whole pipeline, starting from k-12, and going all the way up through senior promotions. You have to think about which companies you do M&A work on, where you source in the world, and how you're going to engage with HBCUs and others.
Most importantly, you have to take action, and not just talk and write about it.
You have to change internal cultures. You have to recognize the biases and buzzwords such as "we don't want to lower the bar". You have to remind yourself that not too long ago, programming was something that very smart people, trained in many different things, engaged in as a side thing, not as a primary thing, and that's what's built our current industry.
meh, it's a lot of work, and will take many more years of concerted effort.
[+] [-] scott00|9 years ago|reply
* Percent of San Francisco MSA that is black: 7.9%
* Percent of Atlanta MSA that is black: 32.8%
* Percent of college graduates that are black: 10.0%
* Percent of CS college graduates that are black: 11.5%
* Percent of engineering graduates that are black: 4.45%
Sources:
http://www.directemployers.org/2012/08/16/the-college-class-...
http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/12_1YR/CP...
[+] [-] fwadfka|9 years ago|reply
The number I got for 2015 was 2.5% (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12101868)
One of the key sources of this difference is whether you count "Information" degrees as CS. My number doesn't include information degrees and yours does.
[+] [-] protomyth|9 years ago|reply
This isn't unusual for technology companies. It isn't even unusual for research labs[1]. So, basically, the company has delegated its hiring diversity to a university admissions department. Worse, many universities only accept people into their graduate program from certain other universities. I've never heard of a recruiter from any of these golden schools visiting anywhere near me[4]
Add to this ageism that is prevalent in technology and you have a the makings of lip service.
Why is ageism problematic? Many minorities, particularly enrolled members of Native American tribes, go to school later than their white or Asian[2] counterparts. Many go into the military or need the extra time to sort themselves out. They typically go to a community college first (different path from average), then go to a university[3].
The school I went to was on Microsoft's list to hire only support people from. IBM didn't have that hangup and got one of the best developers I've ever known and it worked out fine for them.
I would love to see these companies be a little wider with the hiring net, but I don't believe it will happen. They'll wring their hands and talk and release reports[5], but it won't change a thing because they don't get the basic problems.
1) in my youth I was refused for a summer internship because my high school and college were in the same area code....
2) seems Asian isn't considered much except in the reverse of requirements - see the lawsuits against the California university system by Asian students
3) I'll leave the discussion on scholarships and students lying to get scholarships directed at certain minorities for a different time
4) hell, when I was applying in 1987, I had to travel to get the applications, pay the fees with money I really could have used, and never get a reply. Someone told me it was because, like everyone on the reservation I was from, I had used a post office box for my address. That seemed a bit far fetched to me.
5) I'll believe something might change when I see "enrolled tribal members" listed on their reports and a list of schools that includes ones that actually care about recruiting in diverse areas.
[+] [-] zerohp|9 years ago|reply
As an anecdote, I have observed older students that attend the "right" school and achieve high grades are highly sought after by companies.
[+] [-] ReadingInBed|9 years ago|reply
It's partly up to us to make diversity happen. We can prioritize offers that have diverse teams, and when we get a chance to hire to value diversity of experience.
[0] http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html
[+] [-] Tunabrain|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|9 years ago|reply
I can see how that would be true for some types of development, but there are also many type for which I don't see offhand how it would matter.
For instance, if I were doing web design for my employer's shopping cart site I could see how having a diverse team could greatly help because the team would have people on it that are part of or identify with more of our customer demographics.
I as a white male mid-50s atheist tall fat guy could easily inadvertently come up with a design that might turn off non-whites, females, young people or elderly people, religious people, short people, or skinny people. Even if I don't end up doing something to offend people, I could simply miss opportunities that people of other backgrounds might see.
In fact, I've seen that kind of thing. I saw a company that was making CD-ROM caching software in the '90s find a nice cluster of sales when an employee who was also a Mormon pointed out that this software worked extremely well with the CD-ROM genealogy databases that were becoming quite popular among Mormons. Without that Mormon employee, they would have probably never noticed that Mormons could be a distinct market segment for this product that was worth specifically targeting.
What I actually work on, though, is backend stuff like processing orders and subscription billing, interfacing to payment processors, reporting sales tax in the US and VAT in Europe, analyzing A/B tests, and so on. Would having a diverse team working on this actually produce any different results?
[+] [-] th0waway|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] prostoalex|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Larrikin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rco8786|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rando289|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] fweespeech|9 years ago|reply
I agree this is a substantial part of the problem, particularly in larger corporations where they do target specific cities/schools.
However, I'm not sure I can agree with the implication you should locate engineering offices based on the demographics as its the only way to fix the "cities where they locate their engineering offices". Demographic/diversity shouldn't be a criteria for office location.
You shouldn't have to move your entire organization just because the city you happen to be in is ~5% Black and the largest minorities happen to be Asian or Hispanic.
For instance at $Day_Job, the floor I'm on is 25% Asian, 5% Hispanic, 5% Black, 65% White. That is pretty much +/- 5% of the actual demographics.
I wouldn't argue we lack diversity because we just follow the local demographics. I'd say the problem is when you are so out of whack with the local demographics it becomes absurd. For instance, an office in Atlanta that is 90% white.
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if even that is true for California tech companies. California cities feature a diversity which is absent from their local tech companies.
California's tech companies appear to be here for the VC money, not the local labor pool. California's schools, by and large, do not output a globally competitive workforce. The tech workforce is mostly brought in from somewhere else.
And California's government doesn't seem to care about the demographic mismatch.
[+] [-] rando289|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Alex3917|9 years ago|reply
E.g. if the expected percentage of black engineers if there were no bias in the hiring process was 2%, that seems like important information to include.
[+] [-] JPKab|9 years ago|reply
Let me put it bluntly: I grew up in the rural south. I NEVER meet other programmers who have a background remotely similar to mine, ever.
When was the last time you worked with a coder who grew up in a place that wasn't a wealthy suburb or a nice city?
How many people who grew up in trailer parks work at Google or Apple?
The author is right: not enough black folks at these companies. What is sad is that this is a symptom of the real issue, which is socioeconomic and geographic in nature, and the companies trying to do something about it are only focusing on the symptoms.
This means that even companies like Apple will never fully address the underrepresented groups. America doesn't have a race problem, so much as a culture problem. Obviously culture is extremely aligned with race, but think about it this way: the geographical and socieconomic layers that are excluded by these tech companies are filled with people of all colors, and nobody gives a shit about the people that look too similar to the white folks from wealthy cities that have every advantage.
[+] [-] clifanatic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dareobasanjo|9 years ago|reply
Assuming everyone who graduated with a CS degree from the US was hired at an equivalent then one would expect something closer to 7%-8%.
[+] [-] woah|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rando289|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selectron|9 years ago|reply
The assumption that a white applicant and a black applicant should be roughly equal is a strong prior. I would need to see convincing data to counteract this assumption.
[+] [-] jameshart|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whack|9 years ago|reply
> "I also quickly learned that hiring managers for “good internships” don’t come to black colleges looking for interns regardless of how good the students are."
I've never met anyone who didn't claim that their colleges is full of good students. There seems to be a heavy bias here - everyone has a rosy opinion of their own college, but clearly, companies can't go to every single one. If you feel that X college, whether it's a HBU, state-college, community-college, or code-camp, is great enough to be shortlisted over other alternatives, you really need to make a compelling case for this, using data. Just saying that Microsoft doesn't recruit from the college you used to attend, and therefore, they are being unfair/stupid, doesn't sound like a great argument.
> In one of the most reasonably-priced major cities of America, a ten-minute walk from one of the world’s top ten engineering schools, Google has an office. There were once dozens of SWEs and SREs in this office, humming along, cranking out GWT, nerd shit etc. Google decided to close Atlanta engineering
Again, this sounds exactly like the point above about colleges. There are ~30 major cities in America, and Google can't open significant dev-centers in every one of them. If you think that ATL would provide great value for Google along all axes (not just diversity), you need to make a compelling case for it. Just stating that Google doesn't have a major office in ATL, and therefore they are being unfair/stupid, isn't a great argument.
> There were also the Hiring Committee meetings that became contentious when I advocated for diverse candidates. Candidates who were dinged for not being fast enough to solve problems, not having internships at ‘strong’ companies and who took too long to finish their degree. Only after hours of lobbying would they be hired.
> when tech companies talk about “lowering the bar” by hiring minorities they are actually just saying they don’t want to hire minorities since no one in tech actually has a bar that works very well in determining good versus bad hires regardless of ethnicity or gender.
This was the part I actually found most troubling. Google has an extremely high rejection rate - a large majority of their candidates end up getting rejected for "not being fast enough, not having strong internships" or for any number of other reasons. When the average Joe gets rejected for the above reasons, it's ok, but when a diversity candidate gets rejected for the same reasons, it's suddenly a problem?
And what exactly is the author advocating when he talks about how interviews are useless, and therefore, there's no point in having a bar at all? It just sounds like the author is saying that there's no way of figuring out who's going to be a great candidate, and therefore, you might as well just set some minimum qualifications, and then hire anyone who meets those minimum qualifications and happens to be a diversity-candidate. It's arguments like this that make people think that diversity == lowering-the-bar. Yes, hiring is extremely hard, but no, that doesn't mean it can be skipped or watered down. Every successful company needs to figure out some heuristic that will allow them to hire only the best candidates, and any diversity push needs to be made while still respecting this stringent heuristic. If you think that Google's heuristic in unfairly biased against diversity candidates, in a way that's unrelated to job performance, you really need to provide evidence for this. Simply saying that Google rejected some diversity candidates because they didn't pass their evaluation-process, is a really weak argument.
Overall, I agree with the author's thesis that the interviewing process is biased in many ways (race, gender, age, height, charisma, eloquence, etc etc), and that we need to do more to fix these problems. But the arguments he presents are so weak, and the insults he piles on MS/GOOG/FB are so unfair, that I find myself disagreeing with most of what he says.
[+] [-] adrianN|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dareobasanjo|9 years ago|reply
However most Silicon Valley tech companies under-hire from this demographic for their own reasons.
[+] [-] getgoingnow|9 years ago|reply
*SAT-Mathematics
White - 534
Black - 429
Asian - 598
Even if Blacks get CS/Engineering degrees, they can still be less competent than Asians/Whites. Tech companies attract the most talented people (e.g. Google gets millions of job applications per year) and they can pick those who are the most competent/best in class. Those are usually Asians and Whites. For example, if 10% of all CS degree holders are Black, you can't expect that there will be 10% of Blacks at tech companies.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171
[+] [-] lonefermion|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] henrymercer|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dlss|9 years ago|reply
Has anyone looked into the possibility that rather than Apple being uniquely good at diversity hiring, Apple is just uniquely good at gerrymandering their diversity report?
[+] [-] fwadfka|9 years ago|reply
https://www.apple.com/diversity/pdf/2014-EEO-1-Consolidated-...
[+] [-] toyg|9 years ago|reply
If they were serious, they could look beyond their institutionally-placed (and fairly arbitrary, let's say it) obstacles, like Apple did for his friend; but they won't, which means they are not serious.
[+] [-] dforrestwilson|9 years ago|reply
I'm 5'8 and male. Height tends to correlate to success and salary. Should I receive special treatment because of my disadvantage? Perhaps a certain ratio of company board members should be required to be under a certain height threshold.
I've also been bald since I was 18, a trait I have no control over, but which likely led to some lost opportunities (with the opposite sex at least). Do I deserve something special for that?
[+] [-] davidf18|9 years ago|reply
I did undergrad EE/CS at Illinois/Urbana and I don't recall any blacks in any of my classes at all.
I've worked at high tech firms and never see black programmers/engineers.
I've worked for a Wall Street bank and never saw black programmers/engineers.
I've been to many tech Meetups and conferences and other conferences where software plays a major role but I've almost never seen black engineers/computer scientists.
Some of the meetups / conferences I see few women, but I do see women in the aggregate, but almost never blacks and I'm in NYC where there are many blacks.
I've been to Google Tech talks in the Google building in NYC yet never see blacks.
Since the meetups don't require you go to "the right school" etc. and are free to attend it shows that there just are that many blacks that seem to be interested.
Computer software and hardware are those areas where competence is extremely important. Hire on merit, not on other indicators.
[+] [-] beat|9 years ago|reply
When I looked at the adults around me growing up, I didn't see educated people. The responsible adult professionals were motorcycle mechanics, truck drivers, stuff like that. The less responsible were day laborers or petty criminals. The only people I encountered who were educated were teachers and doctors, and the wealthy men my father often worked for whom he condescendingly called "edjicated mow-rawns" in his thick Kentucky drawl. What I knew of success was seething class resentment.
I don't think I knew a single adult who was an engineer or technical professional. But I was clever, and read a lot of science fiction. I was originally interested in automotive/motorcycle engineering, having grown up around racing. But I discovered computers in high school, and that was that.
The boundaries we can imagine are limited by our childhood experiences. If you grow up wealthy and privileged, surrounded by doctors and lawyers and executives, you expect adulthood to look like that. If you grow up in a world where the only adults you know are hustlers and criminals, that's what you can imagine.
So why aren't there more black engineers? In part, because there aren't black engineers. And what black engineers there are, are underemployed, because they didn't necessarily go to the elite schools or have the other earmarks of privilege.
Fixing this is going to take more than the myth of rugged individualism.
[+] [-] bookmarkacc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thelock85|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubernostrum|9 years ago|reply
I agree! Unfortunately, right now there's quite a bit of evidence that we hire based on skin color and sex, disregarding merit. Let's fix that.