

Behind Silicon Valley’s Self-Critical Tone on Diversity, a Lack of Progress - zt
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/new-diversity-reports-show-the-same-old-results/

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oldmanjay
an industry built on the legends of the self-starters is now under near
constant attack for not offering helping hands to people who demonstrate no
actual interest in being a part of it aside from wanting a piece of the pie.
I'm not even sure why I should care, frankly. it's not like a uniform
distribution of skin tone and genital structure is going to improve things in
any technical sense. this is all meant to soothe the emotions of hand-wringing
observers.

~~~
badsock
It's not helping hands that's needed, it's the removal of factors that
actively discourage participation in tech culture for arbitrary reasons of
race, gender etc.

And it's not hand-wringing, it's anger at watching people who would otherwise
be substantive contributors in a technical sense be subjected to abuse until
they leave the field.

I see the lack of diversity at these companies as a sign of distortion in the
overall tech community - the reason they're having a tough time getting the
diversity they want is because so many people have been discouraged long
before they develop the chops to apply at a place like Google.

~~~
oldmanjay
You neatly listed every talking point we've all heard a thousand times, but
framing the debate using your preferred rhetoric doesn't address any of my
points.

The "removal of factors" is a helping hand. The expression of anger is the
hand-wringing. And the lack of diversity is a lie - no engineering team I've
seen lacks Asian and Indian men and women.

Being discouraged to achieve your dreams is not exclusive to people of "color"
(suddenly I'm transparent?) or the "minority" of women. Perseverance is a
character trait that successful software engineers need. Giving up because
there are barriers to success is a signal that can't be ignored, frankly.

~~~
badsock
The way that women (for instance) are treated in tech forums is frequently
outright abusive. My anger at that is not a talking point, it's real. And your
last two sentences are the equivalent to "it's not a problem, tough it up",
which is a big part of how things got this bad in the first place.

The number of women in technical roles today at Facebook is 15%, at Google
it's 17%. A similar figure from, say, IBM in the 1980s would be 35-40%. The
genetic predispositions of women have not changed in the last 30 years, the
difference is cultural.

You feel that the way you'd like things to be is under "near constant attack".
Good. Because the status quo in tech culture is far from meritocratic, and
people who defend it clearly don't realize how much damage it's done, and how
much talent we've wasted on its account.

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bruceb
I have always thought universities should have a mandatory get to know
available majors day. Everyone knows Business and Social Science (the majors
that fall under these) but there are majors such as construction management,
soils management, and yes even computer science that a lot of people don't
really know about. Along with this should be the employment rates and avg
salary.

I say this as I randomly took a construction management course maybe my last
year of college just to see what it was like. Nearly all the students (all
male) had a family background in construction. They knew about the major
before coming to college.

Will the gender ratios change dramatically? No but at least give students a
chance to really understand their options. This is especially true of students
who first generation college students, who would tend to be black/ recent
immigrant hispanic.

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leroy_masochist
On a variety of fronts -- lack of diversity, broken management, work/life
balance, etc -- the standard Valley tech startup communication strategy (both
public and internal) seems to be acknowledging the problem while doing little
to solve it.

It's a clever strategy, because it's quite different from what the Fortune
500s tend to do, which is pretend the problem doesn't exist. If you
acknowledge that the problem does exist, you get points for being honest, and
moreover, transparency about the existence of problems is often a strong
heuristic for those problems being solved. In other words, a communications
strategy of, "we know this is messed up and we're fixing it" inspires a lot
more confidence than, "problem? what problem?".

Tech companies get away with being shitty places to work (long hours,
politics, misogyny deeply embedded in culture, etc) for one main reason --
they are growing quickly. Growth is the mission, and meeting growth goals is a
kind of perpetual emergency, much in the same way that in totalitarian
countries the revolution is always still in progress.

Speaking firsthand from past experience at a privately held "unicorn", and
secondhand from many friends' experiences at others, the tactic of using
quarterly town halls in which the CEO gets up and says, "I know things are
really messed up and you're all working too much and we don't have enough
women or people of color and we need to refactor our management because most
of you don't know how well we think you're doing or what your career options
are if you stay here and .... " is pretty widespread. This strategy makes
employees -- who are usually pretty smart people -- believe that everything is
going to be better soon, because they want to believe it, just like they want
to believe that their options are going to be really valuable one of these
days. After all, their company just raised another private round at an 11
figure valuation.

Nietzsche observed that madness in individuals is rare but in parties, groups,
and eras it is the rule. I think a lot of this stuff is going to look pretty
ridiculous in a decade or two (to the extent that it doesn't already).

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tzakrajs
It seems that the failure is in education for minorities in inner city
neighborhoods. If minorities tend to live more to urban neighborhoods is it a
surprise we continue to see this problem downstream? What is AppleGooFace
doing to solve the underlying issues?

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Zigurd
That's obviously not the problem with women. Women are more numerous and, on
aggregate, do better as college undergraduates than men. There's no excuse for
that not having a large impact on hiring.

It is therefore also possible that bias, if not exactly racism, factor in to
the lack of progress on minority hires. There's a lot of room for the
employers to try harder, before they can blame the education system.

~~~
austenallred
My computer science classes had an average of 98 boys to 2 girls. It seems to
me that the problem may be a lot more systemic than hiring bias.

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sigsergv
I think the problem not in tech giants, it's much deeper: schools, colleges
etc. If large groups of people don't have (or don't want) access to education
that's the problem that must be solved.

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sigsergv
It looks like achievement in games, seriously.

