
Jesse Jackson to take on Silicon Valley's lack of diversity - wozniacki
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_25369262/jesse-jackson-take-techs-lack-diversity
======
byoung2
_" Jesse Jackson wouldn't be heading to Hewlett Packard or any of the other
big tech companies if they had done their job and accomplished diversity," she
says. "He's shining a spotlight on one aspect of the growing inequality of
this country."_

I think that the problem of diversity in tech starts long before your
interview at a Silicon Valley company. It starts at home, and at school. If
you get more children of color exposed to technology (the making side, not the
consuming side), math, and science early, then you'll have more of them in
college, and more qualified candidates of color applying for Silicon Valley
companies. What you expose kids to early on shapes what they'll become later
on. If you emphasize basketball and football to Black kids, you'll get an NBA
and NFL that are 70% Black.

~~~
ryderm
This. I don't think companies that are fighting for qualified employees are
turning down candidates because of color. I'm in a CS program at a university
and I can only think of a few CS students who aren't white/Asian/Indian. The
issue isn't with hiring, but with early exposure and education to all
races/genders/whatevers.

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jbuzbee
Sounds like another Jackson shakedown that will benefit his children:

[http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1964&dat=19810901&id=p...](http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1964&dat=19810901&id=p_4sAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1MwFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1398,149634)

[edit, here's another]
[http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-04-08/news/01040800...](http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-04-08/news/0104080087_1_jesse-
jackson-busch-yusef)

------
adamwong246
I really wish we could be more pragmatic about the lack of diversity in tech.
Do we really care about "diversity" or do we care that we are losing out on
potential talent? And why is it always that those wringing their hands over
the situation (so often non-programmer outsiders) seem to have their own axe
to grind? Could it be because the valley is filled to the brim with money?

I'm in it to win it. I'm not here to help somebody else get ahead. Not that I
want to kick anybody on my way to the top but this industry is very
competitive. The lack of women, racial and sexual minorities is terrible and
unfair and it should change, but I'm more concerned that we are shutting out
smart, creative workers. In the end, isn't that the point of our (supposed)
meritocracy? Diversity must come from within our community and for the right
reasons, not out of the terror of being shamed by a self-appointed guardian of
righteousness.

~~~
dropit_sphere
You should consider the advantage you have of being aware of the industry at
all. Not everyone has that opportunity. Some portion of responsibility
devolves on you to share the (not entirely meritocratic) good fortune you've
received. As the song goes, check your privilege.

~~~
donatj
This is just silly. One fifth of the world is on Facebook, they are aware of
Facebook and that it makes ton of money, they are aware of the industry.
Interest ≠ Privilege. I grew up very poor but was always VERY interested in
technology every way possible. I got a 20 year old computer used for very
cheap in my early teens and learned to program on this. Almost any child is
capable of this. Its not privilege, its interest. Anyone with _interest_ is
perfectly capable.

~~~
thatswrong0
There are environments in which interest is much less likely to develop. For
instance, what if your peers had thought and repeated that learning and
reading were stupid? Or what if your parents were completely apathetic about
your education? Or what if one of your parents was in jail your entire life?
What if you had no choice but join a gang?

There are children, and maybe you were one of them, who can persevere despite
these circumstances. But I think it's important to note that the differences
in interest can also be a result of 'privilege'.

~~~
gretful
That wouldn't be donatj's fault, it would be the fault of the culture holding
their people back. Maybe JJ should look inward instead of outward for a
solution.

~~~
thatswrong0
I agree. I think that Jesse Jackson is indeed being ridiculous in what he is
targeting. We should be investigating the systems that lead to a lack of
minority candidates applying to work at these companies.. Namely, systems like
the entirety of the criminal justice system with discriminatory policies such
as 3 strikes or the war on drugs.

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IvyMike
At my last company, I interviewed around 100 candidates for senior/principal
software engineering positions.

There was filtering before things got to me, and maybe the people doing the
filtering were racist. (I don't think so, but how would I know?)

But of those 100 candidates, only one was black.

I think somewhere upstream the pipeline is broken.

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datawander
I find this sentence very weirdly written from a stat viewpoint and not
helpful at all to the "average" reader.

>>>>About one in 14 tech workers is black or Latino both in the Silicon Valley
and nationally. Blacks and Hispanics make up 13.1 and 16.9 percent of the U.S.
population, respectively, according to the most recent Census data.

Why didn't they say about 7% rather than 1 in 14?

1/14 ~=7.14..%

I accidentally scrolled into the comment section and my head imploded. Thank
goodness for HN :)

~~~
jcizzle
Because the average reader may be inclined to think the numbers are
reasonable, and then they'd be less likely to spark an outrage, and then this
newspaper wouldn't get as many ad impressions.

~~~
alukima
I'm confused, black and hispanics make a combined 30% of the U.S. population
but 7.14% of tech workers and that seems reasonable?

What am I missing here?

~~~
jcizzle
Yes, it does. The number that matters is number of available black and
hispanic tech workers versus the number of employed black and hispanic tech
workers. If there was a large discrepancy between unemployment rates for
technology workers along racial lines, then we could claim discrimination by
companies.

Instead, what you and this article are talking about is that perhaps not
enough black and hispanic people are being exposed to technology as an
industry. In which case, the failure would be on a lot of variables:
community, family, schools, socioeconomic status, etc.

Blaming a company for not hiring non-existent people is sure great for Jesse
Jackson's business model, though.

~~~
DerpDerpDerp
It's also possible that there is a legitimate reason (from a business
perspective) they'd preferentially hired white tech workers, such as
socioeconomic class leading to better training. (We see this effect in other
places.)

I highly doubt that many of the confounding variables (age; exposure over
time; socioeconomic status; etc) have been ruled out to come up with that
statistic.

Not that I don't think there's a problem, just saying, the businesses might
not be racist so much as minorities underperform (relative to their potential)
because of socioeconomic factors. If that's truly what's happening, I'd argue
that the place to combat that is the economics of the situation, and not
attacking businesses for making prudent decisions.

------
bertil
I didn’t know most of the people named as minority influencers were non-white
(with the exception of Microsoft’s Satya Nadella). I read every blog post by
Drummond and I had no idea he was African American. These are thought leaders
who, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, are not “expert about being black” and I think
they do a lot more good than Jesse Jackson.

I’m not saying there isn’t a problem -- but the solution seems to me that it
should come through a system that allows a candidate to say: “There are rumors
my skillset is going through a shortage. I believe I have been discriminated
against by the recruitment process (no matter what that was: if you list
grievances, too young, too old, too female, too male, too nerdy, too black,
etc. they pretty much define a pavement of all job seekers) and it doesn’t
matter. Give me a job, tell me what I can learn to be the ideal candidate, or
sh-t the f-ck -p.” I haven’t been to San Francisco a lot, but everytime I was
shocked by the amount of candidates throwing their CV at me; they were of
every age, color, skillset and gender that I could think of. I represented a
company based in Europe and they complained that European companies do not
open offices in SF fast enough to hire the local talent… (which came out as…
well, mind-blowing self-serving and unworldly to me).

I hate to ask but… Is he really going after a guy called Gomez about diversity
in power positions? And I’m sur HP was iconic when Jesse Jackson was more
active, but… isn’t there more iconic companies around? They might not have
public shareholder meetings.

------
arbuge
There is plenty of diversity in the Valley... Indians, Asians, Europeans...
What is his issue here?

~~~
colmvp
As an Asian American male, I've seen a great mixture of white and Asian men in
tech companies in Silicon Valley. I've never worked in a frat house type
startup, but rather ones with a great mixture of high end talent. So I concede
I might be only experiencing an outlier.

Asians in America put a much higher priority on education than other races, at
least based on college graduation statistics. If you look at marriages, the
pairings which have the highest rate of possessing a college degree are
Asian/Asian, White/Asian, and Asian/White. Most engineering jobs require a
degree, so is it really a surprise that Asian's have higher representation in
tech than perhaps other races?

I chose to do coding and design because it was something I enjoyed. Growing
up, I did it on my own time despite the fact that it wasn't a particularly
socially attractive endeavor especially compared to sports. I'm not griping
that the NFL/NHL/MLB or Hollywood have few Asian American men or that I didn't
end up going into those industries.

I get annoyed when people just assume that 'men' in tech purposefully exclude
other races and genders. I couldn't care less the race or gender of the
applicant.

~~~
judk
How wealthy were your parents and neighbors?

~~~
colmvp
Parents: Upper-class

Neighbours: Upper-class

That being said, I went to a no-name high school and no-name college. I worked
my way into startups through connections in college and living abroad.

------
alukima
This is why I get annoyed when I hear people claim that their workplace is a
true meritocracy and 20 of 20 employees are white males. So only white males
have the intellectual talent to make it in tech?

I totally get that it's not meant that way, but that's what it looks like to
people who are not in SV tech.

Off topic but since this has come up this week several times: Meritocracies
seem great in theory but rarely work in practice. What exactly are we
measuring? How much code you can write in an hour? The quality of the code?
What if you spend more time helping other members of your team with new
concepts and that limits the amount of code you can write? What about the
people in the office who support you and help you get things done faster? Do
we include things like pairing skills?

The only time I worked at company who claimed to be a meritocracy I benefited
greatly but people whose skills weren't as easily measured were unfairly left
behind. We had a PM quit after being denied a raise and his departure set us
back quite a bit, clearly we weren't measuring his value accordingly.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Not that I have any particular stance on the legitimacy of meritocracies, but
why would a meritocracy imply racial diversity, exactly?

~~~
aristus
If the system were fully meritocratic, you'd expect a lot more females in the
industry, for one. Unless you suppose that females of all races are
objectively less capable in some way. But then you'd have to explain why there
are so many females being successful in other hard sciences like biology.

The fact is that many people aren't given early access and encouragement to
technology, and the ones that do experience constant pressure and put-downs.
Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not. I've done hundreds of interviews and
dozens of interview trainings, and have personally observed lots of silly
behavior, from treating women more harshly than men, to dismissing a candidate
because their family name implied a background of poverty.

A "safe" example to think about: it's very common to rubbish people who went
to this university or that one instead of yours, which is obviously the best.
You can write that off as good-natured play, but consider that I've had to
build a career in tech without a degree. It's only by the slimmest chain of
coincidences that I was able to even get the opportunity to be seen and
evaluated. The "meritocratic" system simply doesn't _believe_ that anyone
without the nous to afford college is worth even noticing.

The hiring manager at the end of that food chain is often unaware of all that.
He (and it's usually a "he") passes over resumes and chuckles at their
university choices, then picks "the good ones" to jump through hoops and from
there picks "the best". To him, that's meritocracy.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Alright, I can agree with that.

Once again though, meritocracy would only mean equal opportunity and not
necessarily facilitate any particular effort for equal representation. A
system can still be meritocratic (although I'm not saying ours is) while
social influences still skew the demographics.

------
marshray
If Rev. Jackson (or anyone) knows of an untapped pool of talented developers
with some combination of skills in C++, C#, crypto, network security, and/or
machine learning, my team is hiring.

Even the degree could be negotiable if (as in my own case) the candidate has
acquired a solid understanding of CS principles some other way.

------
t82176
Perhaps Jesse Jackson should contribute to an open source project of his
choice then.

~~~
alukima
You don't have to be an expert in a field to criticize it's culture.

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jgalt212
a noble task in ignoble hands

