
Tech Companies Still Aren’t Hiring Black Workers - mozumder
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-08/tech-companies-still-aren-t-hiring-black-workers
======
weiming
I'm not originally from America, so I seem to be missing something in articles
like this. Why does no one talk about the "pipeline problem," that is,
encouraging many more people from "minority" groups (black, women, and so on)
to pursue coding from young age? (Edit: or encouraging these groups to enter
the field at any age, such as through the community college
system/Coursera/etc.)

It seems like examining the end of the funnel (and placing blame squarely on
tech companies) is all too easy, and is much easier than addressing a root
cause (not enough people of these groups studying CS to begin with.)

~~~
protonimitate
Because addressing the pipeline problem means admitting that racism is still
alive and embedded in the foundations of our education and work force system.

You can't expect there to be more workers if there's no applicants. There are
no applicants because there is a severe lack of Black people (among other
groups) represented in Engineering/STEM degree programs. That stems from a
lack of good public school education.

But like you said, it generates more clicks-per-article to blame the Big Bad
Tech Companies for not being diverse enough, when really we as a national
don't honestly want to see marginalized groups succeed. Americans operate by
and large on a zero-sum assumption. Many believe that if one group of people
succeeds, it somehow will undermine their own success.

~~~
noetic_techy
> when really we as a national don't honestly want to see marginalized groups
> succeed

How does that explain the success of Asian Americans?

~~~
protonimitate
I think that depends on how you measure success.

Strictly in business terms, sure they have more success than other groups, but
I don't think (assuming here, no facts) they have over taken White people as
the predominant group in leadership roles, high paying positions, or otherwise
'stakeholders'.

If that's not true, feel free to correct.

~~~
todd8
See [1] and [2]. For example, 2015 median household income for Indian Asians
is $100K while the same statistic for white non-hispanics appears to be $63K.

[1] [http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-
in...](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-
the-u-s/)

[2] [https://www2.census.gov/programs-
surveys/demo/visualizations...](https://www2.census.gov/programs-
surveys/demo/visualizations/p60/256/figure1.pdf)

~~~
dahdum
They also have much lower crime rates, much higher entrepreneurship, and
higher educational attainment.

Skilled immigration is _awesome_ for the US.

~~~
alphabettsy
This tends to be true for all recent immigrants, 1st and 2nd generation
immigrants have much higher acheivement.

------
Talyen42
I hired about 10 junior dev/qa/pm positions over 3 years as a manager in a
SaaS tech company of 50-100.

We posted on every job site and received 1,000+ resumes which I reviewed, in a
city with ~30% african american population.

Maybe 3 out of 1,000+ resumes were submitted by african americans, and none
met most basic requirements for the position (either a relevant degree, or at
least 1 year of related experience, or at least 1 relevant side project).

It's hard to think that I was part of the problem, or could possibly be part
of any solution, as the hiring manager.

~~~
davidcbc
How do you know whether someone was African American based on their resume?

~~~
Talyen42
Someone's name + linkedin profile (almost always included) tends to give it
away 90% of the time. Sometimes you don't know, sure, but usually you do. Just
like gender.

We didn't ask, of course.

~~~
davidcbc
You looked up 1000+ people on LinkedIn?

~~~
petraeus
Thats literally his job ...

------
spoiledtechie
Im gonna be the antagonist here and say, black people still aren't getting the
degrees required for such work.

Now, ONLY if these tech companies would drop their requirements for university
and college, they might see more applicants.

Tech companies should sponsor universities or even create their own. I can see
some of the major companies saying "hey, we have this university, which you
can attend for FREE only if you work for us for 6 years." Sign up?

Until either black people start taking more classes for tech work, OR tech
companies start a university theirself, I don't see this happening anytime
soon.

I work with 80% foreigners. 20% Americans. Its only because the Americans
aren't going into Tech. Sad, but true.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
> Tech companies should sponsor universities or even create their own. I can
> see some of the major companies saying "hey, we have this university, which
> you can attend for FREE only if you work for us for 6 years." Sign up?

Who do you think would the tech companies recruit for these positions? I think
you just described a large scholarship with strings attached. I don't think a
company would be willing to foot the bill unless they think the investment is
really going to pay off for them.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Such programs exist already. The SMART program for instance, which links
college scholarship to a job. Companies do it all the time.

~~~
spoiledtechie
They do it for black kids? Do they go into the inner cities and ask around?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Lets talk money instead of 'race' e.g. the Latino problem is similar, so money
is probably the more important factor. Other programs like QuestBridge work
hard to recruit folks who are underrepresented, either by family income or
kids who are first in their family to attend college.

~~~
spoiledtechie
Um, the article explicitly describes race. Just staying on topic.

------
reknirt
Does the number of black workers that have the technical knowledge/experience
account for more than 2-3% of the total pool of hirable workers? Or do black
workers only account for 2-3% of tech employees because that's the number that
knows how to code?

~~~
empath75
It’s less than that in a lot of places. It’s a massive societal problem and it
needs to be fixed from elementary schools up.

------
zaroth
Oh wow, that chart titled ‘Little Has Changed’ with the X axis pushed out to
100%.

Looks like, if you squint hard enough, Facebook has at least tripled their
number of black coders.

~~~
smaddox
If you scroll over, it shows that the share increased from 1% to 3% from 2014
to 2017. And the total number of employees has almost certainly gone up in
that same time frame.

~~~
zaroth
So their fastest growing demographic then!

------
IncRnd
The entire premise of the article is false. The article states that "tech
companies aren't hiring black workers."

The truth is that black workers aren't applying to tech companies. In the last
decade I have never once had a black person interview with me, not a single
time. Yet, the black person who is on my team (hired before I joined this
team) is one of the most skilled and knowledgeable people I know. He is
rewarded for his knowledge and work.

Articles like this are poisonous.

------
devmunchies
I don’t think this applies to dark-skinned Indians, so it must be more than
simply skin color.

------
to_bpr
_He said the party reminded him of a scene in the film, “Get Out.’’ Like the
movie, the new employees looked like props that were conveniently staged to
showcase a more welcoming environment than he felt actually existed._

It's amazing to behold how absolutely toxic tech journalism and our industry
is becoming. Divisive clickbait full of finger pointing, anecdotal evidence
and a clear steerage away from causation... yet sitting pretty on the front
page of Hacker News. What a shame.

------
nomy99
I have noticed a similar trend at engineering campuses. So universities aren't
recruiting black students?

~~~
onion2k
Why would people of color take engineering courses if there aren't any jobs
for them afterwards?

~~~
monochromatic
Tech companies are being actively leaned on to lower their standards to hire
more black workers. Saying there aren’t jobs for them is nonsense.

~~~
nomy99
"lower their standards to hire more black workers." do you hear yourself? You
have linked color with standard. Companies hire based on skill, experience and
culture fit.

~~~
dahdum
Let’s assume (correctly imo) that every subgroup (race, gender, origin,
sexuality, etc.) is equally skilled. If you apply a technical standard
equally, you end up with a market distribution of hires.

Companies are being leaned on to over represent certain groups relative to
their market distribution. That’s not possible industry wide unless you lower
your technical standards for that subgroup.

~~~
nomy99
First of all, in the technical field you can not lower standards by much. A
person either has a degree or necessary experience or they don't. The fact
that they are underrepresented is because the talent isn't there.

Now, OP's statement, no matter how much justified it is logically is
propagating a nasty stigma associated with black workers -- that they are here
to meet a quota or are less intelligent and experienced.

------
sb8244
I try to avoid conversations like this rather than engage directly because I'm
likely to question results until things are more proven. However, I'm seeing
things like this more often and want to become more informed.

When looking at the percentage population of Americans with bachelor's degree
(general req for software company), should we see a reflection of that pool in
tech companies? I found some census information which shows that the pool of
black or African American workers might only be about 5% compared to white.
Should the industry reflect this or do we somehow expect to have an
unnaturally high diversity?

Someone else pointed out here, but putting the chart at 100% makes me feel
like this is a piece for views and not information. It doesn't make sense when
showing relative improvement.

[https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr10-19.pdf](https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr10-19.pdf)

~~~
scottlamb
5% isn't great, but it's still higher than the 2-3% actually employed by these
companies, suggesting improvement is possible.

I think one major problem that's in the companies' power to solve is that they
don't have offices where black people live (e.g. Atlanta). Coming to work for
these companies means being isolated from the black community both at and
outside of work.

------
nutdip
Being black is correlation not causation just like being a woman. This
nonsense has to stop

------
ManlyBread
And as usual with these articles it's always the fault of the evil universites
and terrible companies while the people in question are always devoid of any
responsibility of getting the right education, having initiative and obtaining
the right skills needed for the job.

------
RestlessMind
If tech companies hire globally, shouldn't their racial demographics mirror
the world demographic stats?

In my 15+ years of experience in SV, majority of my colleagues were from Asia,
which accounts for 60% of world population. Rest were evenly divided between
Europe and North America, and some very tiny fraction coming from Africa and
South America. In that case, isn't it expected that blacks[1] would account
for 1-3% of workforce, since USA itself accounted for 10-15% of the workforce?
If Democrats are open to immigration, then a consequence of that is going to
be an under representation of blacks and Latinos.

[1] black is hard to define in many places. Eg. Who is "black" in Asia?

------
cuddlypsycho
This problem starts from early childhood and is reflective of the utter
failure of public schools in lower income districts.

For too long we have used the band-aid of lowering standards and affirmative
action at every stage after, in college and hiring, to kick the can down the
road and the result has been quite the opposite, leading to more bias and
resentment.

If you are a highly skilled engineer and black, you have to constantly deal
with the stigma that maybe you got to where you are not based on your
outstanding abilities but only to fill some arbitrary racial quota.

There is nothing worse than that for ruining someone's self-esteem.

------
jacob019
Most of us here support and appreciate diversity. The lack of diversity in
tech companies represents a lost opportunity. It's not just black people, but
women as well. The mono-cultures can encourage some troubling attitudes and
restricts creative multi-cultural ideas.

Forcing companies to maintain racial/gender quotas is not the solution. I'm
not sure what the solution is. The causes for the situation are multifaceted,
a reflection of our country.

------
projectramo
For all of those who claim it might be a pipeline problem, I looked it up and
it looks like 4% of engineering degrees are granted (earned? Awarded?) to
African Americans

[https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/aamajors.c...](https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/aamajors.cfm)

Ill leave the interpretation up to you

~~~
n1231231231234
but isn't this inline with the original article?

> Blacks made up 7 percent of U.S. high-tech workforce, and just 3 percent of
> the total Silicon Valley workforce.

4% of the degrees are granted to members of the AA community, 3% of the jobs
in SV are given to them.

i guess SV companies recruit from the top graduates. it would be interesting
to know the percentage of AA of say the top 10% graduates in the STEM fields.

as others have pointed out, this doesn't mean that things are OK. it just
shifts the focus from the hiring companies to the education system

~~~
projectramo
Yes, so your line of questioning is the one I would follow.

I agree the next question is what is the percentage of AA grads from top
schools where they recruit before one makes a call on the prevalence of the
pipeline problem.

------
ggregoire
Uber took some initiatives to address this issue.

[https://www.uber.com/en-MX/diversity/uberhue](https://www.uber.com/en-
MX/diversity/uberhue)

[https://eng.uber.com/uncovering-genius](https://eng.uber.com/uncovering-
genius)

------
padobson
I'm willing to accept there is racism in the tech industry, but I'm not
willing to accept that it is the ONLY variable keeping black folks from tech
jobs.

This problem needs a real, statistical, multivariate study. Any publication
casting judgement on the tech industry while remaining unwilling to pony up
the dough for such a study should be properly criticized for playing the race
card and inventing false narratives to gain readership.

Telling me there aren't many black folks in tech is not enough. I need a data-
driven explanation of WHY before I accept it's mostly racism, or it's mostly a
pipeline problem, or it's mostly a primary education problem, or it's mostly a
cultural problem, or it's not a problem at all because black folks don't want
tech jobs in the first place.

------
itchyjunk
Please forgive me if I am missing something here. Is a company to make a chart
of color distribution of their employees and base their hiring on that? There
has to be a better way to figure out if a company is hiring based on skill or
not than just this.

------
b212
In Poland where I happen to live there are almost no black people at all, I'd
guesstimate it's much less than 0,1% of the whole population but we have
similar problem with women in tech.

There is only one solution in my opinion - ignore the problem at all, because
there is no "problem".

If you're a good candidate no one here will question your beliefs, skin colour
or sex.

Focusing on the issue on the other hand creates bunch of other, in my opinion
more serious threats - I've been recruiting for a medium* Polish startup a few
years ago and one day our CEO decided there is not enough "diversity" so HRs
started recruiting women left and right.

Long story short, for 8 out of 10 positions we'd have two or three resumes
from very strong male candidates and tens of resumes from much less
experienced females. Within 3 years we hired so many women the men became the
minority, about 6 months after that the place went bankrupt and everyone ended
up jobless.

*medium in this world means up to 40 folks

TL;DR every sane company hires the best workforce they could afford. If there
are not enough people of colour it's usually problem with these people, not
the employer.

------
calvinbhai
Someone recently had tweeted the concentration of Black population in the US.
Tech companies are no where in those concentrated areas.

Porbably a way for Tech companies to build diverse teams, is to setup research
facilities and programs that encourage better pipelines, in states with higher
black population (not SF, LA, NYC/Austin)

------
matthiasak
well, how dare they!?!?

