Anybody who thinks the hackers from Duke/UNC consistently outshine the hackers from NC A&T is a damn fool.
I was regularly FLOORED by the skills and raw programming chops from peers at NC A&T. Some of the smartest young men and women in the CS field.
I worked in a small research group at NC A&T. Maybe 10 undergrads. Last time I checked, there were something like 6 MS in CS folks from that group and a couple of PhDs.
When I was an undergrad at NC A&T, we had a weekly colloquium for all CS students. We regularly had alumni from NC A&T and other HBCUs on stage who talked openly about navigating the hiring world, which companies you could expect racism in, and what the working world of programming was like for "people who look like us."
If some shitty recruiter event occurred, we all knew about it.
Want to score some of the best engineers from HBCUs? It's easy. Hire the best ones you can convince to take your mega-FAANG package from. Then send them back every freaking year with a corporate card and tell them to impress people.
I hate these "stupid recruiter" stories. Somebody should get their ass fired.
I think that's pretty awesome. I went to Elon, and the only time that we heard about the A&T CS program is the time that I participated in an ACM programming competition. We heard more about the Duke program than anything else. (Research related). I knew a little about the UNC Chapel Hill program because I had a connection with Fred Brooks.
In terms of CS, it's NCSU that regularly produces the most accomplishments of the NC higher education universities, but it doesn't have the same national standing because the humanities departments at NCSU are a complete joke. What Duke and UNC-CH do well is that all their departments are generally considered rigorous and that increases their standing in the rankings.
Can you do the same for say Duke? Even Googling, I couldn't find an obvious CS superstar name or practical everyone-knows-them Jeff Dean-type. And the whole point of the article is exactly that in the insular tech circles and parties we move in, we don't get to hear or see from the NC A&T folks.
I was just looking for some reasonable way to decide if the OP's claim about NC A&T grads was true.
I asked about noted accomplishments simply because I couldn't think of any better way (within reason) to evaluate OP's claim. I'd be happy to hear other approaches.
I can understand why one would think this. That assumption is part of the reason I shared the story. If that were true here, the A&T students would have had the experience of the Duke/UNC group.
In case people didn't read this story carefully before commenting (we all do that sometimes), it's worth calling the nut graf of this story out:
The firm this engineer is talking about did a recruiting trip to Duke (and UNC), like every big tech firm does. An hour away from Duke is the country's largest HBCU, NC A&T, which is included on the trip, ostensibly for inclusivity's sake.
The firm serves a catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session, which is held after class hours to ensure attendance. The next day, highly-ranked prospects from Duke/UNC are invited to a private dinner at a fine dining restaurant.
That same day, the firm holds an abbreviated meeting during class hours at A&T, where they serve (wait for it) the leftovers from the catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session.
I have done University recruiting and been at recruiting events, I have never seen leftovers ever re-used, by any company, ever. I'm not even sure of the legality of that or the logistics of it. How were leftovers transported safely from one campus to another? 99% of the time, it's pizza (it's always pizza), and it's given away or thrown out at end of the event.
You're catching a lot of flack but in my experience this is true. We always leave the leftovers with the students who attended as (1) all students, regardless of school can always use some good leftovers, (2) the logistics and health concerns make this pretty much impossible. You 'd have to be a sick SOB and put in extra effort to do this; not characteristics of HR drones who just want to check a box.
Heh, this reminded me of my previous company, where the CEO hosted a Christmas party at her house where only the development team was invited. The next day, the rest of the company was served the left-overs, instead of the regular catering.
It was definitely an eye-opening moment for everyone in terms of realizing which department was the CEO's favorite.
Well, the CEO herself came from a computer science background, and was of the mindset that the product was so good it sold itself. She constantly complained that the sales team might as well be digging ditches in the desert. Didn't have the guts to test that theory, though.
Probably something like, “oh, we have to go to this no name university next“, “what do we have?”, “well, we can bring these pizzas...”, “yeah okay, let’s put them in the car and get this over with quick”.
It’s unfortunate the author didn’t call out the company by name but I guess I get it. If they did it may elicit some stronger push for change.
Unfortunately, anonymity can breed some distrust in the content. By calling out the company by name, it may cause others who experienced the same to speak out too.
He said that he went on a trip TO North Carolina. His LinkedIn shows he worked for Cisco in RTP, NC. He then worked for Nutanix and Lyft in Seattle. So more likely it’s one of those two.
Say what you will about Cisco licensing (too damn expensive in my opinion) but Cisco has consistently been rated as one of the best tech companies to work for. Which is something no one would say about IBM.
I'd love to know how people working on WebEx rate it because WebEx is the worst, the absolute worst, video and conference calling app I have to use at least semi-regularly. Every time I have to use it I know it's going to waste a huge amount of peoples' time: the first 5 minutes of any meeting are always a shitshow and the audio quality is always terrible throughout. Also, none of us needs to be interrupted by an automated announcement telling us that somebody has turned up 10 minutes late to the meeting - STFU and get out of the damn way of the conversation.
It gets trounced by Microsoft Teams. Teams! Think about that! The latecomer to the party that's actually turned into something pretty decent.
So I find it really hard to believe that anyone working on WebEx could possibly rate Cisco as a great place to work. A great place to sit around and do sweet F.A., maybe, whilst your userbase seethes and rages, but not a great place to work.
One of the more disappointing aspects of this-- it's not even a good service to these businesses to operate this way. Some of the least effective colleagues I've had the pleasure of working with attended these brand name schools. Now, I certainly wouldn't say that represents all graduates, but some of them are absolutely being carried because they look good on paper. That's no way to build out your workforce.
I've never heard of NC A&T so I went to Wikipedia [0] and learned their average undergrad SAT on intake is ~1,000. Average SAT at Duke is something like 1,500.
One of those is top 5%, the other is sub-50%. It seems a stretch to say the biggest problem the NC A&T group faced was not being invited to the right parties.
SAT isn't the be-all and end all, but those difference are far too large to be brushed aside. It is not at all obvious that race is the major factor here.
There is a case here that the recruiters were being realistic; the smart black candidates would presumably be working to get into some university other than NC A&T. The CS program entrants would need to look like legitimate geniuses compared to the average to qualify for red carpet treatment.
Actually, that's how lots of graduate recruitment is moving to, looking at those contextual elements now (such as value add, and performing better compared to relative median).
Sometimes this means that someone graduating from a university with a decent degree when the average intake grades were comparatively low shows they are and are capable of outperforming to a greater extent. They don't have to evidence themselves as legitimate geniuses, just that they have the capacity to develop faster.
Obviously it then comes down to bias about whether the university is just scoring people higher, but that's a whole different ballgame.
Brand name universities still get the preferential treatment though, often because they have more developed alumni links with the hiring companies.
I'm sorry, but I didn't get into Duke as a 17 year old. Does that mean my career prospects are shot for good, and that "Hooli-esque" companies shouldn't recruit me?
I'd say the software engineering side of things are a bit different, the interview process and testing "is the gatekeeping". It might impact your ability to climb the ladder when you're competing for Sr Manager positions with a bunch of MIT/Standford/Harvard/etc type of graduates, depending on where you live....
...but by then, you'd have crushed your early career and gone off and gotten a prestigious Master's Degree, or founded your own company and sold it to one of the bigger fish, earning your way into Sr Leadership...
This is certainly the prior I bring to this story: that all this elite recruiting is horseshit anyways. But, of course, that horseshit also gatekeeps the most lucrative jobs in one of the most important white collar professions in our economy.
I just don't get which world the people who make these decisions live in. I've worked as a developer for almost 2 decades now & some of the best programmers I worked with were high school or college drop outs. And some of those that went to elite schools were mediocre.
I'm sure there is some positive correlation between school ranking and quality of education but it seems too weak & there are so many exceptions for this 1 data point about a candidate to be given such weight. I'd absolutely take someone who went to Colorado State University & has 3 years of relevant job experience than someone fresh out of Stanford (all other things being equal).
Also almost every time I was involved in hiring we had more competent candidates to choose from than we had jobs to fill (with exception of the highest tier jobs, like searching for a Tech Director or CTO which nobody is giving to people fresh out of school anyway) so why do you even need to butter up the Duke grads? Are recent grads with no job experience so desirable in the US?
According to this study, you're correct. The funny thing is that when it was discussed in HN at the time is that the thread had many comments from students who went to MIT, Stanford, etc. trying to deny it.
I think one thing is that people factor the college they went to in terms of the jobs they are seeking (not just in terms of pay, but also prestige of the company they are looking at, flexibility with moving, etc.), that may not matter as much at the high-end of the pay range or after years of experience, but I think right out of college this is important.
My argument is basically the low-end of the jobs that someone who went to Princeton and excelled in computer science is willing to settle for is higher than the low-end of jobs that someone who went to a lesser-name school and excelled in computer science is willing to settle for.
In theory, if the difference in quality of education is enough, then the level of education that someone who excelled in computer science at Princeton vs someone who excelled in computer science at a lesser-name college would equal out this difference in expectations, but I don't think that is the case, at least when we are talking about high-end school vs mid-range school.
Moreover, in computer science especially there is a lot of self-learning. Someone who has done consistently better than their peers probably has a good talent for self-learning, even if the average of their peers is lower.
I think you get the same discount for quality when hiring weird people or people with odd job histories.
My general idea here is that if someone is less desirable in a way which you do not care about but where other companies might care about, they are probably going to be on average of higher quality than someone more conventionally desirable asking for the same salary range. Not saying this is an iron law, but I think it is a tendency.
> I've worked as a developer for almost 2 decades now & some of the best programmers I worked with were high school or college drop outs. And some of those that went to elite schools were mediocre.
Within the software industry there should be a negative correlation between school quality and performance as an employee. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox . People who are unqualified and unfit to do good work have been removed from the pool. Anyone in the pool who is unqualified must be fit to do good work.
During my undergrad years, there were people who made it out without programming in any language besides Java, and barely did any tech hobbies or independent programming outside of class. There were others who were constantly learning other languages, playing with random tech, and building small opens source tools and webapps.
I've met people who went through community collect programs who didn't understand basic BigO notation or algorithm optimization (no fault to them; it's just not taught in a lot of two year courses) and I've know people with only high school degrees who've picked up advanced CS books and would learn about compile theory and different types of parsing on their own for fun.
Absolutely you get out what you put in. My company has thousands of programmers. I was in charge of helping a group of programmers self learn a new framework/language. It started off with 30. It ended up with me alone in a room. This was easily 3k worth of free classes. It was not even that hard you just had to watch some videos and maybe do some simple coding, maybe 1-2 hours a week, 9 sessions over 3 months. Most just did not do it, which means they would not show up to the sessions. By the last 2 sessions I just did not bother to try to get them to come. There were 3 I could kind of coach along and get them to sometimes engage. But mostly they just were not interested in helping themselves. They wanted me to sit in front of the 'class' and teach it. Now that I think about it this could be a good way to filter for people who are motivated to do work. But it would bias against people who have a full schedule.
Nah, your instructor's/TA's time is limited. I can't schedule 6 hours with them. I can't request as much time as I want. Colleges have other prerequisites which must be filled. The American systems don't let you go to college and do nothing but computers, and you must take time away from programming courses eventually. I can't maximize the time for programming, so, I'm limited to what I can put in. And if it's a tough college, it takes real effort to pass those other courses and you likely can't just coast. It's a forcing function with guidance.
If I put in a ton of time on my own to study stuff from the internet, that's the internet returning my investment of time and focus. It's got nothing to do with the college at that point.
I found that if you want to talk about the professor's research area, they will often have time to talk, at least at the beginning / end of classes or over emails.
I'm not as sure with TA's, partly because I often skipped the TA-sessions for various reasons.
I think on the engineering side it's different. the interview process is the gatekeeping and FAANG companies are totally open to interviewing anyone who thinks they can get through the process. Your ability to climb into Sr leadership might be impacted, if that's the direction you want to go, but you can absolutely prove yourself in engineering.
Also, I like your point about CSU. I do a lot of hiring in the Boston area, and we have so many "second-tier" schools who produce absolutely excellent SEs. It might be trickle-down because of MIT here. Don't get me wrong, definitely hire MIT, but we also cherry-pick from Northeastern, WPI (my favorite), etc. with equally as good results.
For someone who was just starting out and went to a no name college (no insult intended - I did), what signals would a FAANG company have that you are even worth their time interviewing?
I graduated in the mid 90s so I really don’t have a frame of reference. But, hypothetically speaking, if I had graduated in 2012 from the same no name college but spent a lot of time “grinding leetCode” and had the technical altitude to do well in the interview would they have even given me a chance?
I also went to a good but unknown school and was recruited by Amazon and Google. As far as I can tell it was purely due to applicable work experience (which I got working in companies you never heard of).
No one is arguing that once you have your first job, what college you went to matters. If you can get that first job, then only experience matters.
Heck on my very sparse LinkedIn profile, it basically showed me as an enterprise C# CRUD developer and recruiters were reaching out to me from Facebook and Google even though I wouldn’t get through the first fifteen minutes of a technical phone screen for either without at least six months to a year of prep. Recruiters throw out a wide net.
That being said, after the local market tanked post Covid, and my unknown company with less than 50 people all in did an across the board pay cut, I threw a Hail Mary and applied for a remote job as a consultant for AWS. I had the experience and I knew it was going to be a remote interview so I took a chance and got in.
But would they have recruited interns from my no name college - even if I did try to give them some type of signal like side projects and an AWS cert?
Historically Black Colleges and Universities came out of the very interesting history of the US. Where black people were paying taxes to universities they were legally discriminated from attending. Rather than treating people of all races as equal those states created vocational colleges (anything with Ag in the name was a vocation school) exclusively for black students. And even then they were given a pittance of funding compared to other public universities (referred to as PWIs, predominantly white institutions).
There is both a pipeline problem and a bias problem and they are intertwined.
Historical discrimination has left black families much poorer than they would otherwise be. Poverty discriminates in myriad ways: lack of good role models and mentors, poor educational environments, lack of nutrition, lack of opportunities for enrichment, etc...
Discrimination is also still present and different ethnic groups are affected differently.
The negative effects of poverty and discrimination compound over time such that when you get to a tech company's hiring process, the pipeline would have shrunk massively. The students in this pipeline are competing against upper middle class kids who have been groomed their entire lives to compete in the system designed by people like them.
As to the recruiting pipeline, there is class elitism/narrow mindedness in tech companies that does narrow recruiting. Some interviewers don't countenance views or attitudes other than their own just as some recruiters favor certain universities far more than others. This seems to be changing at least at the recruiting level.
As to why some ethnicities still succeed or fail despite discrimination, that is at least partly cultural and partly selection bias and these in turn have also been affected by discrimination past and present.
Lastly, I suspect the beef some poorer whites have is that they too have been discriminated against due to poverty and they feel that another group now has a leg up on them and that discrimination against them isn't acknowledged.
I hope that we come up with a just system for everyone.
> Historical discrimination has left black families much poorer than they would otherwise be. Poverty discriminates in myriad ways: lack of good role models and mentors, poor educational environments, lack of nutrition, lack of opportunities for enrichment, etc...
While this is true in some cases, and you do point out that "discriminiation is also still present", I can strongly recommend "Reflecting on the Color of My Skin" by Marques Brownlee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-_WXXVye3Y
Regardless of the material differences between black and white people, I think white people (including myself) tend to underestimate the effect of constantly being treated as "the first black guy who..." -- that's racism too, and while not always toxic, it holds up a lot of other discriminatory practices by being the foundation of differentiation.
That video reflects purely on skin colour and I feel that can be harmful. My skin is white but I'm descendant from the Australian Stolen Generation (google it if you want to see more). I was raised in a poor country town and I literally joined the military to escape that life. Compare that to the experience of this Youtuber. He was a golfer at 10 years of age... I don't even know how you could ask parents to spend that sort of money on you at that age. His story screams privilege (professional ultimate frisbee for one). I make decent money now since I used the military for a CS education but when I go shopping I choose to go to the low socioeconomic area. I don't fit in culturally at the upper middle class shopping centers. I don't dress the same, talk the same, hold the same values, etc. Not feeling like you don't fit in isn't just linked to race.
That being said, poor black African Americans (and
Aboriginal Australians) have horrible life outcomes, far worse than any I could expect. Second generation black immigrants from Nigeria and Ethopia have better life outcomes than the general US population so it's not just about skin colour. I feel that there is a whole host of intergenerational related issues impacting the African American community. In addition, I feel that mainstream culture is quite hostile to African American culture.
You are accurately identifying that he uses his identity to hide his class in order to increase his profits. This is what modern corporate diversity initiatives are in a nutshell.
The is intersectional analysis and has been a core part of activism for decades. Race is a huge and essential component to systems of oppression in the US but it is not the only component.
But people working on this problem already know this at a deep level. This does not take away from the importance of understanding how race fits into the systems of oppression.
My issue is the way the media talks about "white" and "non-white". Being born white isn't some ticket to a silver spoon, and with so much emphasis on purely race there are negative repercussions.
i.e. I just googled it [1]. The fourth link talks about the relationship between usage of White Privilege and how it impacts peoples view of poor white people. There is so much emphasis on skin colour that the guy in the Youtube video literally won the privilege lottery at birth (compared to ~95% of other Americans) and still feels oppressed enough to make a video about it.
If his video had of been purely about solidarity for the Americans born porn and black I would have supported it since that demographic needs solidarity to help get out of the hole they were born into. Instead, he made it about himself and his rich boy problems.
> Being born white isn't some ticket to a silver spoon, and with so much emphasis on purely race there are negative repercussions.
This is also not new information. Again, this is the basis of intersectional analysis. Activists have been talking about this and working on this for decades, yet people use this as some sort of argument that modern analysis is broken. "White Privilege" only means "being born white is a ticket to a silver spoon" to people who haven't been involved in this discussion before.
I'd argue that it's the way the term is being used every day in both the media and social media. The academic term might be different but it's not that definition that's driving discussion.
I have already seen that video. I think not having a first doesn’t have to be discriminatory. The courage to not be dissuaded by that is actually a positive character trait.
See this interview https://youtu.be/3RG5pXTpLBI 18 minutes in. He was short and was failing out of spacewalk training so he figured out a way to make it work.
>I think not having a first doesn’t have to be discriminatory
What do you mean by this more specifically? If you're a part of a minority with a history of oppression, which I hope we can all agree is true for black people in the US, are you saying there's zero things questionable about constantly pointing out that someone is black when they enter a "typically white" area of sports or other activity?
I have always taken for granted that the definition of "racism" is not necessarily the same as "hating someone due to their race", but more generally "defining someone primarily by their race in a situation that does not call for it and only secondly by individual attributes". Examples of where it may be "called for" is obviously up for debate, could be highly relevant in medical trials for example.
I mean that there are two groups of people involved.
The first is the person or people who is/are potentially the first of a particular ethnic group to achieve a position. If you are that person or people, you will need courage to not let that dissuade you. I don’t see any discrimination there. If you are dissuaded because there is no one before you, then you need more determination because for most people bad things happen in life and you need to deal with it.
The second is everyone else. It would be discriminatory if others defined the first by their race in that situation. But that discrimination doesn’t necessarily happen.
It's little bit like the tragedy of the rich people's kids: No matter how brilliant you are, many people would simply assume that you have been given the easy route thanks to daddy.
Surely it is annoying and may make achievers to prove themselves over and over again, I don't think that it is big enough of an issue to dismiss programs that are designed to tackle real issues in the society. It's just that people should know where to stop and don't try to implement these in communities where less than perfect but good-enough status is achieved.
I honestly don't have much sympathy for that particular plight. Living in the shadow of your parents is the tax you pay for being born into tremendous wealth? Sign me up.
See, you assume that just because they are kids of rich people, they must be some kind of leech. It's deeply similar to all kind of discrimination but at least they can cry in their summer mansion sipping some nice French wine.
It's well known fact that kids of alumni traditionally get accepted in their fathers ivy-league alma matter, but god forbid if few minority kids get an easy way in, then you have viral videos about how it's impossible to get into SOMETHING unless you are black asian gay.
Apple makes a summer coding camp for girls, and you have men crying all over the internet that it's now impossible for men to make career tech anymore.
I mean, I myself have some macho pride(in a sence that men should have some qualities, like not crying when something is not happening the way they want and so on) and makes me cringe when I see an able bodied man crying about how a school girl got an easy way and she is not better than him but he got left out. I think Greta Thunberg struck a cord there, it was hard to watch grown up men having their egos crushed by a teenager.
Look, I think you have an axe to grind and I'm probably not the right person to talk to about this. Yes, I think sipping wine in the Hamptons is better than worrying about your next rent payment in the Bronx.
Everything is relative, worrying about your next rent payment in bronx gives you tremendous security, opportunity and wealth compared to most people in the world.
I think it's a good summery. Just remember that, when interpolated more widely, it applies to everybody in all kind of settings. Getting into a position where they can worry about paying the rent in Bronx is the dream of many people who have much more serious things to worry. It doesn't even need to be about material things.
There seems to be a real tradeoff in how the Americas vs the old world see 'coming from a good family'. Our mythology on this side of the pond is so focused on the idea that everyone is inherently equal and capable of achieving great things, that we celebrate and even embellish when someone successfully changes their social class.
The downside is that we lack a sense of nobless oblige. the idea that much will be demanded of those to whom much is given doesn't mesh well with our values of universal humanism - people born to privilege on this side of the pond seem to have more of a sense of guilt than duty about that fact.
I have no sympathies for people like that; they live risk-free and can live comfortably off their parents' money. A lot of the role models / founders / Trump got kickstarted into their career because of money from parents + the social safety net they offered.
If you have nothing, and if your parents have nothing, you can't risk it on a new venture.
Yeah, this is a seriously under appreciated effect in Silicon Valley founder culture. “Just send it bro,” and “failure is totally cool,” are both much easier beliefs to hold when you’re getting an allowance and, in the absolute worst case scenario, could get your rent, phone bill, and healthcare paid for by mom and dad for even a few months.
It seems to me, despite the issues we're seeing with their offerings, that society gained a lot of value from what those lucky few were able to do. It is an unacknowledged reality worth thinking about, but I hope the discussion centers around how more people can be afforded the opportunity to fail.
I've checked wikipedia and it seems that affirmative action that was designed to remove all those inequalities was introduced something like 30 years ago, so one generation lives in the environment without discrimination. Has this affirmative action failed?
For at least 10 years all big companies have "equality & inclusivity" departments that are taking care of giving equal opportunities to "oppressed minorities" members. Is that just PR or something substantial?
>I've checked wikipedia and it seems that affirmative action that was designed to remove all those inequalities was introduced something like 30 years ago, so one generation lives in the environment without discrimination.
The conclusion ("one generation lives in the environment without discrimination") doesn't come from the premise (that affirmative action was introduced 30 years ago).
Yes, affirmative action was introduced 30 years ago. But it hardly put an end to discrimination (among other reasons, because even if affirmative action was great, well applied and totally effective, discrimination is not constrained in the domains that affirmative action affects).
Affirmative action is hamstrung in many ways and also is fighting against one of the strongest social forces in US history. Why would we expect it to fix everything in a generation if it works? The fact that racial bias remains a huge problem does not prove that affirmative action is useless.
These equality & inclusivity departments do work. Not by including minorities mind you. They work by excluding white people, making them feel unwelcome by constantly reminding them how everything bad in the world is their fault, and firing them when twitter demands it.
Even if this is true (I don't think they have that much power), why do you think this is what minorities would want? They don't want to be treated as equals and have opportunities, they want to make white people feel bad?
The issue is that D&I had no power to do things that actually matter. I've complained to D&I teams before and they really exist to placate people internally because leadership will never change. When something gets out that seems like a bad PR problem ("twitter"), then the leadership team will take acute action and fire someone and pin it on inclusion.
It's a bad system for everyone but it's born out of cyclical system where white people do nothing about racism until it reaches some breaking point, then they insist on taking immediate action to "fix it" for a month, then they go back to the same old.
It’s born out of a system that seeks to protect the owners of capital by scapegoating the workers and making it the workers problem, rather than the problem of the people with the political power and money to make meaningful change.
You really can't compare the two cases. When you're born into that type of system, where your skin color is seen as less desirable, it's easy to develop inferiority complex and a lot of insecurities that will hinder ones will to reach for the top. I'm from a third world country where a lot of emigrants to the US tend to be more successful than the average Black American. It is easy to jump to the conclusion that they are lazy and all, but I have come to realize that we were not born or have parents that have been demoralised by the systemic racism common in the US
The trouble is that the way out is not easy. We can no longer keep talking about "you're at a disadvantage because you're born into x." Even if it's true, mentally it paints a victimization culture that brings people down. If you tell someone the major of their problems are due to their class, or the history of their people, or police or some other bogeyman (both real and imagined), how are people going to see a way out?
We can't keep blaming. Maybe the narrative needs to be, "Yes, the scales are not as fair as they could be. Maybe they're super unfair. But fuck em. Show them what you can do, and don't stop until you beat them at their game!"
I don't know if that's naive or overly simplistic, or if it's just some form or noble lie or noble truth.
A lot of it is luck too. My father grew up during a war, his family lost everything and had to start from scratch. He made it through University where his two brothers struggled to learn English. They all grew up in the same situation, and he's told me he didn't know what made him different. Higher IQ? Stronger drive? Who knows.
Yeah it is. But if you model it as a statistical likelihood and you start two populations at different distributions you would see how long it would take for them to "catch-up" as a group.
What you're telling people is "keep at it, you'll get there in a couple decades". Meanwhile the disparity continues, leads to more prejudices (because yeah, statistically they're poorer/underrepresented) and counteracts some of the "pure luck" gains.
I hate to break it to you, but it is a noble lie. Black people in America were born into these disadvantages long before people were talking about them. There wasn't a victimization culture, but they were still being brought down, because the culture isn't what is bringing them down, but rather the system that was designed and implemented to keep them poor and disadvantaged.
Weren't many of those kids coming from India, for example, "born into that type of sytem"? Isn't that exactly why they are here and not there? I would dare say that racism/classism in modern day India is much worse than it is here in the contemporary US.
Another wrong analogy. If you look at the statistics correctly, you will notice a lot of emigrant from India to to the US tend to be from the upper class
“it’s just a mindset”, takes all responsibility off of the ruling class and places it all on the backs individual. While I’m all for taking responsibility for oneself in a rigged system, I’m not going to pretend the system isn’t rigged and shouldn’t be fixed. Imagine if we promoted approaching flawed and broken software architecture like this.
> Imagine if we promoted approaching flawed and broken software architecture like this
We do. All the time. It's why half the shit we work on is covered in a thick layer of technical debt and the other half is written in self contained microservices.
A software stack from a company that's been around long enough is going to be more random, redundant and glued together than the processes in our evolutionary biology.
I use the 'promote better' ideas when dealing with people in poverty. Usually most of what happens is what I call 'bad choice' economics. Usually do one thing or another. One is not 'fun' the other is. The 'fun' one gets you right now but usually hurts you weeks from now. The not fun one helps you long term. Usually the excuse of 'oh I have money coming later' with no idea of what if 'later' does not happen.
One guy I had to talk down from having his car detailed (150 bucks) vs paying the 2 month late car payment. He literally did not think of the idea of they will take the car away from you if he did not make the payment, until I pointed it out to him. He was very fixated on the 'clean the car'. That is but one small example. I have hundreds of examples like that.
That short term thinking is absolutely acidic long term on you, your family, and friends. It can create a spiral that is very hard to get out of. Being poor costs substantially more long term as well. I as a wealthy person can buy things ahead of time when on sale because I know I will use them in the future. Being poor means you buy in the 'now'. You do not buy for the future because you do not have the means to do so. So on average simple things cost you more. But being in the 'now' can hurt you even worse by giving you fun vs not fun choices. But not being able to see you have been give an bit of 'luck' to make your future better.
The short term thinking was exacerbated by historical discrimination. There were cases where black businesses became successful but then were forced out by whites who wanted what they had. Such a system doesn’t promote long term thinking.
I don't think this hypothesis holds much water to be honest. The most effective way to get better jobs isn't to have the right mindset (although it helps), it is to know the right people who will think about you when something comes up. This is also where I could imagine race (and similar things play a huge role).
The difference here is an immigrant is coming into the system of their own volition, while black people in the USA are born into the system. Both immigrants and black people (and many other groups indeed) suffer greatly but one has been pushed down for centuries and, while the methods are less obvious now, the economic inequality is rooted deep in the system and will affect people for generations to come.
They didn't have a large majority consider them inferior for long, or being bitter that they are not longer their slaves (like they were for their grandparents and earlier) and thinking "how dare they not know their place".
Those immigrants also didn't have seggregation laws against them until the 70s...
"...we find large place effects on individual economic outcomes like income, education, socioeconomic status, house prices, and housing quality. People assigned to richer locations do better on all measures. Random location assignment affected intergenerational economic outcomes as well, with families assigned to more socially mobile areas... displaying lower cross-generational correlation in outcomes."[1]
> They didn't have a large majority consider them inferior for long
Arguably untrue, ask a Trump voter of your choice about whether they think Chinese or Latino looking people are inferior to whites...
> seggregation laws against them until the 70s
All the SV hiring we are talking about is people born in the 80s and 90s. How are those worse off than the SE Asian or middle eastern first/second generation immigrant who also possibly gets racially stereotyped in some places but doesn't have preferential privileged college admissions and special scholarships?
What about them? The majority of immigrants do not arrive at the border with a suitcase and $100. But it makes a great story for the bootstraps demographic.
>Historical discrimination has left black families much poorer than they would otherwise be. Poverty discriminates in myriad ways:
>Lastly, I suspect the beef some poorer whites have is that they too have been discriminated against due to poverty and they feel that another group now has a leg up on them and that discrimination against them isn't acknowledged.
What is needed is to break down issues caused by racism from issues caused by poverty and fix each on their own. Fixing an issue caused by poverty (which itself may be a result of racism) as instead having been caused by racism means the solution is not correctly targeted.
If we target the problems caused by poverty based on poverty instead, you would have a solution that will help minorities more as they need more help, but at the same time help non-minorities who are in poverty and prevent resentment from building that ends up harming the attempts to fix those inequalities.
For issues directly caused by racism, solutions would be based on race (but race should likely be replaced by race and ethnicity, as I've personally seen racial equality initiatives forget that Hispanic whites face injustice very similar to racial minorities, despite the technicality of being racially white.
Last, fixing issues of race, class, and gender (which I haven't mentioned but which should work the same) discrimination should be seen as the starting point, not the goal. These are the big three that cause people the most discrimination, but are not the only three. As they are big three, they should have priority, but others shouldn't be forgotten. For example, discrimination based on LGBT+, on disability, on looks, on height, on neurotypicalness, and other factors still exist in our society: in private life, school life, and professional life. The goal should be that once the inequality from discrimination on the big three are reduced to the size of the level of discrimination these other factors cause, they too become a focus (and to be more pedantic, it wouldn't occur all at once as these other issues are by no means equal, such as LGBT+ discrimination being one of the largest forms of discrimination once you take race/gender/class out of the comparison).
I think understanding each issue makes sense. Then you can trace each issue into their side effects. It’s possible that the issues have a common side effect that can be addressed with a single solution.
For example, unequal understanding of career possibilities is a common side effect. I had a favorite class in middle school where a professional (in my case an accountant) would come to our class every two weeks to teach us about their profession.
I think many more members of the tech community should do the same. Furthermore, they should serve as ongoing contacts for the kids such as providing opportunities for internship, for tech presentations, etc...
We need to do this not just for the urban poor but increasingly for the rural poor as well.
If like the army, companies were forced by need to develop pipelines, things would improve. But, if you can hire from abroad and short circuit the hard work necessary, what choice do you think companies are going to make?
This is not particular to companies either. People most affected by offshoring will support offshoring by buying cheap goods produced by offshored work ensuring a positive feedback loop that will come and get them.
If companies were forced to develop local talent because they cannot short circuit the labor market, they would.
As a male Asian American I have been attacked by the system from both a discrimination standpoint, a biased standpoint and a class elitism standpoint.
Where I stand right now even my own race, asian females prefer to date white males over their own race. If you don't believe me watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ8LzkIfmxw. That's just one aspect of the extent of racism we suffer from. It's so bad that females of our own race are disgusted with males of the same race.
I've seen a lot of racism, I've had to battle a lot of the challenges of simply being an asian in a white dominated country, my parents had an even harder time with the language barrier when they first jumped off the boat with literally a dollar in their pocket.
Despite all of this, from my own personal experience I will say this:
The lack of diversity in tech is mostly a pipeline problem. Certain races or cultures or sexes simply don't want to go into tech or aren't willing to put in the effort. You don't even need to go to college anymore to get in, the financial barriers of entry for tech are extremely low.
That is not to say racism is not a problem in tech, but it is by far a pipeline problem by a huge margin. As a member of a minority who has experienced a lot of racism, I will say that for tech specifically, the racism/sexism problem is overblown. If you don't trust my anecdotal experience then google which race has the highest average income in the United States: Asians.
I haven't walked a single step in your shoes, and I don't know what racism you yourself have experienced.
However, having been in predominantly Chinese and Korean social circles, I have had more than a few conversations on the subject and have observed quite a bit of racism towards Asian-Americans.
The racism I've seen against Asians from whites is primarily mistrust, not fear. A racist hiring manager is likely to look at you and think you'll do good work for the company, but they'll have to keep an eye on you. I think it's rare that racist idiots look at your skin and think you're dumb, lazy, and violent.
I think the racism against black people in the U.S. is different both in kind and degree vs. the racism against persons of East Asian or South Asian decent.
As far as dating, as a white guy over 6 feet tall, I've run into a lot more Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating guys over 6 feet rather than Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating white guys. Maybe that's a common convenient lie because it's more politically acceptable. However, at least 2 of them later married 6-foot tall Chinese guys, and I think the majority were being honest about their preferences.
On a side note, my wife was asking me about bullying in the US, and then stopped and said "oh, but you would have been the smartest one in the class, so the bullies would have left you alone". Bless her heart, she figured American bullies worked like bullies in Asia.
If you're smart, went to a top school, and have a good job, most Asian cultures will tolerate a lot of nerdiness out of you.
>The racism I've seen against Asians from whites is primarily mistrust, not fear. A racist hiring manager is likely to look at you and think you'll do good work for the company, but they'll have to keep an eye on you. I think it's rare that racist idiots look at your skin and think you're dumb, lazy, and violent.
I agree this exists but I think most white people in general are just really afraid of being called racist and would never consciously do something racist. Overall, I think the racism that is most prevalent in Tech is subconscious. White people have a bias towards white people that they aren't aware about... that's all. Most white people keep friends that are also by majority white and likely they did not choose that outcome deliberately. So yeah, a "racist" hiring manager might keep an eye on an Asian, but they will likely not be aware they're doing it based on race. Again, not saying this is 100% the case and there are definitely people who consciously discriminate, but I believe that for the majority of white people, it is subconscious. I don't know your opinion on that, as a white person I'm sure you may have a better perspective.
>However, having been in predominantly Chinese and Korean social circles, I have had more than a few conversations on the subject and have observed quite a bit of racism towards Asian-Americans.
Racism is prevalent for sure, but again, I was just emphasizing a very specific thing: the lack of diversity in tech. I'm not saying racism doesn't exist. But for diversity in tech I believe it's mostly similar to the pipeline problem for ballerinas. There is an extreme lack of males trying to become ballerinas... I think we can both agree that the disparity exists not due to extreme sexism by females trying to put a complete stop on all males from entering the industry.
>I think the racism against black people in the U.S. is different both in kind and degree vs. the racism against persons of East Asian or South Asian decent.
It is different, no question. However I would say that the a great portion of the differences in treatment actually stem from a generalized reputation that is an exaggeration of very real statistical difference between races. You may look at a random Asian stranger and a random African American stranger and predict the Asian stranger is more affluent. This assumption isn't just a baseless stereotype... it stems from an actual statistical reality. Asians are statistically more affluent than African Americans. Is it racist to make predictions about individual people based off of probabilities? We use probability to predict all kinds of outcomes for all kinds of things... but it becomes immoral when we use it on race? I have no answer for what's the right way to deal with this moral conflict, but I feel it is important to pose the question nonetheless.
>As far as dating, as a white guy over 6 feet tall, I've run into a lot more Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating guys over 6 feet rather than Asian women who seem primarily interested in dating white guys. Maybe that's a common convenient lie because it's more politically acceptable. However, at least 2 of them later married 6-foot tall Chinese guys, and I think the majority were being honest about their preferences.
There's a very real race thing going on here. Just watch that video I posted, those women are clearly talking about race, not height. There's other videos as well...:
While most women do have a huge bias for height and white males tend to be taller than asian males I do believe there is a separate phenomenon going on here in terms of race.
It can be difficult to “put in the effort” when most of your energy is spent to survive. Not everyone enjoys the luxury of being able to focus on school and extra curriculars from 14-22.
Meaning of the comment was that "most people" entails a higher percentage than "not everybody" (IMO, atleast) though I can see how you interpreted it the way you did. I didn't word it very well, nor did I this. Perks of pandemic sleep schedule.
No he’s right on the Asian women dating more White than Asian. It’s pretty well documented in the Asian American community.
That being said, a lot of that is probably due to attitude of the guys. I live in Japan and even here I hear things like "it’s easy for you to get a girlfriend because your are white". This is dumb for a lot a reasons, including the fact the sheer majority of Japanese girl wants to have local boyfriend, not a foreigner they can’t even communicate properly with. Now, when I ask them about the last time they did nanpa (street pickup), or set a date with a girl they like or any action whatsoever towards the opposite sex the answer is zilch. I asked my own girlfriend when she was once teasing me about the important number of guys who would like to have a relationship with her why did she chose me over the others... answer was something akin to "oh, I know they like me, but noone told it nor invited me to a date". I suspect a lot of angry Asian guys who are alone are also in the low side of taking action.
I used to think that "female" was just a slightly offensive synonym for "woman", but in a world where transgender people exist, it seems useful to be able to distinguish between "male/female" (someone's biological makeup)", and "man/woman" (someone's gender identity).
And in the context of dating and sexuality, it might well be the biological differences that are relevant.
I don't think your sources support that statement. For example, [2] says:
> Surprisingly, among the 127 participants open to dating a trans person, almost half selected a trans person of a gender incongruent with their stated sexual orientation. For example, 50% of the trans-inclusive straight women and 28% of the trans-inclusive gay men were willing to date a trans woman, even though one wouldn’t expect either straight women or gay men to be attracted to women. Similarly, 50% of trans-inclusive straight men and 69% of trans-inclusive lesbians said they’d date a trans man, even though both groups are presumably only attracted to women.
This suggests that for between 28%-69% of people, it is the persons sex rather than their gender which is important for their sexuality. This result is unlikely to be due to transphobia as these are people have specifically indicated they would be interested in dating trans people.
The article says "even though both groups are presumably only attracted to women". It seems to me that this presumption is simply wrong. For many people, their sexuality is defined by sex and not gender.
11.5% of gay men said they would date a trans person. 28% of 11.5% said yes to trans women but all of them said yes to trans men too.
29% of lesbians said they would date a trans person. 38% of 29% only said yes to trans men and 31% of 29% said yes to both.
The article doesn't have the same information for straight people but only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men said they would date a trans person at all. So 0% of gay men, 11% of lesbians, maybe 0.9% of straight women, and maybe 1.7% of straight men would consider sex but not gender. Probably the real percentages are lower. Probably some straight people said yes to both. Many straight men attracted to trans women wouldn't date one.
Porn with trans women is much more popular than porn with trans men. The primary demographic for porn with trans men is gay men[1] even though at least 10x as many men are straight.
The other studies also found few men only attracted to trans women and cis men.
There was an article I came across where a black startup founder was frequently mistaken as a regular employee while his white co-worker was mistaken as the CEO. On multiple occasions the unaware person shook the hand of the white co-worker, ignored the true startup founder, and so on.
"Adding to the insult, [Will] Hayes finds himself at a distinct disadvantage in meetings that open with a case of mistaken identity. Venture capital is based on relationships, and investors aren’t typically primed to write a check when they feel unsettled. “You see it in the body language, you see it in the lack of questions and engagement,” says Hayes, 39. “They can’t wait for this meeting to get over.”
For nearly four years, Hayes would attend investor meetings alongside [longtime colleague] Messick, the former chief marketing officer at Lucidworks. VCs are trained to look for patterns in startup founders, Messick says, and there aren’t many Black Mark Zuckerbergs. 'Years and years of a Black guy and a White guy walking in the room, and the White guy is the CEO,' Messick says. 'Whether malicious, whether negligent, it was always awful.'"
I think you’ve ignored the context of the article. He says that to mean he doesn’t look like he’s going to start the next Facebook or Twitter to VCs, because he is black. They will not entertain the idea that he COULD BE the next Mark Zuckerberg because he simply can’t “look the part”.
I get the gist of your meaning, but many, if not most of the startups valued highest are started by a fairly homogeneous set. I think it has as much to do with social and business connections as it does with racism, which is to say it has an effect which is difficult to measure individually, but which is possible to quantify and aggregate.
So to answer your question in the manner in which it was posed:
Most or nearly all of the Zuckerbergs are non-Black?
You’re making a wild guess with no citation to any studies, but I’ll just go with it. I’d hazard a guess that the homogeneity you’re trying to reference is not limited to _racial_ or _gender_ homogeneity.
In a parallel dimension, Facebook’s CEO is Black. How would that have affected its trajectory? Would it be even better? Would be all be on Google+ still? Or would we all be on Twitter? What startups that exist now are those otherworldly challengers, or collaborators? Would Facebook’s API perhaps be more open if their CEO were of a different race? Depends on the person of course, but it is an interesting inside baseball hypothetical.
If Zuckerberg ever runs for public office, he’s going to get sued if he doesn’t put the CEO hat down while in office doing official duties.
I personally think he should run just so he’s forced to answer unscripted questions live on tv. Much like the upcoming Congressional inquiries. Very interesting times.
What argument are you trying to make here? In an ideal world it would make no difference whatsoever.
You say that about zuck running for office but you've got Trump in that exact seat right now. He's forced to answer unscripted questions on TV and it makes no difference whatsoever. None.
OP said there was one too many non-Black Zuckerbergs, which I took to mean the one we have was one too many, that is, they may prefer he were Black instead? I don’t know what they meant, I just steelmanned it. I agree that bias exists, and it would be better if it didn’t at all in any way, but markets price in bias as well as risk and other factors, likely racism too, unfortunately. Predicting investments of others via their sentiment toward individuals and other groups is an idea I just had, and I don’t even trade or own stocks. This seems elementary to me.
It will matter to Zuckerberg personally because he doesn’t seem to rate well with some people, which isn’t necessary, but helps you get elected, generally. He seems to really care what people think about him in a value-neutral “we’re all just talking” kind of way, which actually isn’t a bad approach, but I want to see how he does live on stage with professional debaters. That’s essentially what Congress is these days: modern sedate mortal combat for American lives in our Colosseum, battles put on for the rich and famous while everyone else watches and cheers, watches and jeers, or scalps entry coins out front.
> OP said there was one too many non-Black Zuckerbergs, which I took to mean the one we have was one too many, that is, they may prefer he were Black instead?
Poorly communicated on my part then. I was alluding to "one too many Zuckerbergs" - in my opinion _any_ Zuckerberg (in terms of a single individual being totally in charge of something like FB) is one too many.
Wow. This confirms something I saw SO often as an undergrad.
I went to a predominantly black city college right next door to Georgia Tech, so we got plenty of big companies knocking on our door.
Only they never took us seriously, gave rushed presentations, and never collected resumes. Tech? They got parties, dinners, entire clubs rented out. It was posh, and if you were like me - you figured out ways to get into these exclusive events, evade bouncers and find an engineer just to talk to them.
There are a few people in this comment section talking about how 'minorities and women simply skew differently'. Maybe try walking a mile in our shoes
Do you think it could possibly be that the black city college might be a lower ranked school than Georgia Tech? Or did Georgia Tech not have any women or minorities? I went to a lower ranked school that was the most diverse in the state, and I've also taken classes at Stanford and Berkeley. There is no question that the students at Stanford and Berkeley were way more motivated, worked a lot harder and were academically much stronger than the students at my school. So I would expect those schools to get a lot more recruiting attention than my school. That doesn't mean the students at my school can't be successful, but it did mean that you had to put in a lot more work than the median student at the lower-ranked school to be successful.
Right. So much of the "racism" that gets exposed in the US is discrimination against poor or less educated people, which needs to be cast as racism to keep the outrage machine flowing. You should tend to discount any race-based statistics that don't correct for economic status.
Of course, there are no examples of elite black-dominated universities abutting poor white technical colleges, so it's not possible to look for an anecdote in the opposite direction here.
There's plenty of historic and systemic racism that keeps black people poorer and less educated. That's where people's outrage should be focused.
The subtext of the story is that the HBCU was visited to check a checkbox, but the students at that school were treated with such disrespect that the underlying bias was clear.
Nobody has any trouble understanding that Duke is a higher-priority recruiting target than A&T.
I think the GP is trying to say there's obvious bias and disrespect, but it's not obvious that the disrespect was primarily due to racism or primarily due to school ranking. No school of comparable ranking to A&T but a more Duke-like racial makeup was visited in this instance. There was racism and/or elitism displayed, but there isn't enough information in this story to rule out elitism being the primary driver for the lack of respect.
Certainly the students should have been treated with much more respect. Multiple people clearly confused priority and respect. The two student bodies should have been treated with equal respect, but we can understand why they might not get equal priority. However, there's not enough evidence to rule out plain elitism for the lack of respect.
Why bother going to NC A&T if you didn't want the students from there? It's performative at best. Why choose that college in particular? For a diversity quota?
Often these sorts of inconsistent decision making occur because multiple people making decisions disagree. Maybe some person high up in HR in change of recruiting scheduling decided Duke and A&T would be visited on these days. Maybe the person in charge of planning the details felt very strongly they were better off putting whatever resources earmarked for A&T toward events with minority-focused engineering student groups at Duke, and so raided the budget without going head-to-head with the person in charge of recruiting scheduling.
For the same reason you don't serve leftovers on a first date with someone you're trying to impress. Which was ostensibly what this firm was trying to do at A&T.
I'm of the opinion it's better that they go, but reasonable people disagree. There are certainly potential economic benefits to the students at A&T at the time, but it could be argued that longer-term cultural progress is hindered by such token displays.
While perhaps not the most professional on the recruiters' part it's hardly racist to half-ass a 'check the checkbox' assignment. Unlike the racist tokenism and just outright disrespectful facade of visiting a school when there is little to no (apparent) interest in hiring from.
It's definitely a little racist to half ass it so hard you're serving leftovers from another school.
I don't think I really agree that visiting HBCUs is racist tokenism unless it is 100% just to get diversity brownie points and nothing else: it's still better than not visiting them entirely and to provide opportunities to underrepresented minorities for which, while the intent is to put them into the corporate grinder, having a high-paying tech job is still a material benefit.
> It's definitely a little racist to half ass it so hard ...
Without seeing how they treated students at a similarly ranked non-HBCU, it's difficult to distinguish racism from colorblind elitism. It's probably a bit of both racism and elitism, but without a comparably ranked school for comparison, I wouldn't be comfortable using the word "definitely".
Ok. If you are going to agree that the situation is almost certainly the result of at least implicit racism, and the alternatives are pretty unlikely then cool. You agree.
The second sentence of my post begins "It's probably a bit of both racism and elitism." I was careful to point that out before pointing out that it's jumping to conclusions to use the word "definitely".
While perhaps not the most professional on the recruiters' part it's hardly racist to half-ass a 'check the checkbox' assignment.
This is exactly why you can't reasonably accept treating one group of people differently - it might be a lazy recruiter half-ass'ing their job, but it might also be actual real racism. There's no way to tell by looking. The outcome is the same.
If you're willing to give them a pass you might just be enabling a racist.
A. What you'll have to do will depend in how finely you divide your population. E.g. recent african immigrant vs. Slave descended are quite different demographics with different life trajectories and you'll be able to tell one from another very easily.
There will be huge political fights over these categories.
B. If you do hire based on population demographics then two things will happen: You'll get a bit more inefficient workplace due to unperforming workers. But more importantly, you'll be surrounding people with a bunch of Xers (whichever the underperfoming demographics is. Hillbillies? African Americans? Republicans? Left handed folk?) who are underperforming. This will cause a strong association in their mind that X=less capable. Xism will then increase.
The influx of women to my workplace really didn't help my colleague's sexism.
Or, you know, like people have pointed out the Cisco has done when other people were speculating this might have been them - invest/donate to the school in ways that improve their graduate's outcomes...
"Cisco, at least at a time did invest in A&T and NC State, far more so than UNC which it didn’t recruit from for a period."
What do you really think about the matter at hand? It sounds like you're playing devil's advocate, but you're not expressing how you feel about the unfair treatment itself.
If we are going to talk about Georgia Tech, it is worth noting, GT is:
No.1 in engineering doctoral degrees awarded to African American students
No.1 in engineering undergraduate degrees awarded overall to minorities
No.2 in engineering undergraduate degrees awarded to African American students
No.3 in engineering doctoral degrees awarded overall to minorities
I can confirm this from the other side. I was a computer science grad from Georgia Tech. When talking with people from Morehouse, the events they experienced with recruiters was very different and less engaged than mine.
I grew up in Greensboro where A&T is located. Many of my high school classmates went to college there. One friend even led the top CS student org on campus.
I pushed so hard for my employer, Sexy Unicorn Startup which said all the important things you expect a woke company to say, to recruit there. I told them I would set everything up and that all I needed was a budget. I got nothing but lip service.
So, HN, you want to do it the right way? I can be on A&T's campus in 15 minutes. I will connect you with the student orgs and help you do it the right way. You won't regret it. Email is in profile.
I've gone on numerous recruiting trips and this story paints a very one sided narrative and it doesn't quite line with my own experiences.
First off, big feeder schools, the Dukes and UNCs of the world, they have extremely sophisticated internal career programs that throw out the red carpet for us when we arrive. Yes we order the food (and its usually pizza), but they literally do all the pre-work and advertise for us, give us the floor and make sure we have the best chances to meet their students. They schedule the program and the times for us, so we just roll in, present, and then have lots of meet and greet with the students.
Second, recruiters only have so much time and energy to meet with students, so they have to go to places with the least friction. The recruiters live by the rule, meet that quota or you're out! So that translates to, schools better have students who can pass the interview process, or they are out.
My company has a huge list of diversity schools that we actively recruit from. This goes against the rules above and requires special recruiters who aren't being tracked against the same quota system. Why? Although these diversity schools produce highly qualified candidates, their career programs aren't sophisticated enough, nor is the coursework aligned with the goal of getting these students into silicon valley tech jobs.
Remember, at a very real level, you're competing for the same jobs at the same level as someone graduating from CMU or MIT. If your CS department isn't preparing you for what's ahead, you have to make that knowledge-gap up on your own.
When everyone at every point in the pipeline throws their hands up and points the finger in front of them, no one takes action and we end up in the same place. As another reply said, change your recruiting practices to account for this difference.
Change isn't free - the question is if companies are willing to spend time and resources for it. Every time a company does this, they have put a price on their acceptance of the problem. For some companies that's a needed survival choice. There are many that are choosing to not fix the problem and instead focus on Wall Street numbers or similar, even though they clearly have enough profit/funding to invest in this societal problem.
Or maybe recruiters could make bigger efforts to make up that gap, instead of throwing up their hands and accepting the institutionalized racism that they are dealt.
And just how do you think the school ratings are calculated? Graduation rates. Job acceptance rate into industry. Oh, wait, that sounds like a self-reinforcing cycle.
Structural racism runs deep.
It's safer and easier to blame structural racism than to look at multi factor reasons.
Partly because to deny structural racism is itself racist therefore strengthening ones case innately, but mainly because as it does really exist so there would always be some influence and something that's in the news right now so it's a fashionable concept to attach any blame on.
Also it gives good social credit to mention it in case people with power over ones career or future question one. It really is a no brainer, we should use it more often.
I'm not being sarcastic here, the benefits of blaming structural racism for complex causes far exceeds any costs of not doing so.
It’s also safe and easy to say “no racism here no sir” when confronted with difficult problems and decisions about justice.
I’ve experienced a small example of this. In elementary school the majority minority school in the district sent basically no kids to the gifted magnet school. Like zero. For years, people just said what you said. My parents actually dug into it and found that grade distributions were similar and the problem was that administrators at the white schools knew how to write glowing recommendations and the admin at the other school didn’t exaggerate as much. A little bit of coordination and adjusting the recommendation letter form structure and bam suddenly way more kids from the majority minority school.
But for years people just said “well that’s a worse school, what do you expect”.
It sounds like you’re arguing that there was racism, whereas your example suggests there wasn’t racism, just differences in application process - it certainly doesn’t sound like there was any resistance to improving the process in a way that resulted in dramatically increased success of minority students. Or am I misinterpreting something?
Structural racism often means there is no one person to blame - there's not going to be a person we can hold up and say, "Here's the racist!" This was a racist outcome because the students, staff and parents in the minority school weren't in-the-know. Why weren't they in-the-know? Probably for racist reasons going back decades.
A system that structurally disadvantages minorities based on race is racism. Why do you think that this one school had more black students? Legacies of housing discrimination.
There was resistance. My mother was hated by other parents for this and two other pieces of local activism. People in church told her that she was hurting their children straight to her face.
What makes you think Duke is some all-white club. I went to Duke and there were lots of African-American students. My guess is that Duke has among the most Affirmative Action of any school.
Could be, but almost every company I have encountered is desperate to hire good people and none of them cared at all about where I or anyone else I knew went to school.
University rankings are next to useless for determining whether a student would be a good developer. Look at the metrics US News uses to rank universities:
* Research reputation
* # of publications, conferences, books
* # of citations
* # of highly cited papers
Where's quality of teaching? Where's student employability after graduation? Where's numbers of student internships? Where's teacher to student ratio? None of these matter to most university ranking lists.
I'm pretty deep in the college admissions and rankings world. You are not looking into the methodologies closely here. US News is a far cry from relevancy.
To teaching:
> The Best Undergraduate Teaching rankings are based solely on the responses to this separate section of the 2019 peer assessment survey.
So you have a bunch of high up academic deans being asked to rank teaching at hundreds of schools. This just boils down to name brand and is not a representation of teaching quality.
Same goes for the methodology for co-op's/internships if you read up there. It's all a self fulfilling prophecy of prestige.
Class size, yeah that's a real metric, but there are a decent deal of large schools with known CS programs with large classes near that 18:1 - why haven't those been eliminated from recruiting?
But, you know, they could have treated NC A&T students with respect, just in case, especially given the general problems with the U.S. news rankings as a heuristic for hirability.
But there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t treat a similar-caliber school the exact same way as NC A&T. Pointing to race as the reason is a very bold conclusion
The thing about a complex sociological phenomenon like systemic racial bias is that for each individual instance it is hard create a causal link. Yes, you can propose a lot alternate explanations for why this could have happened. The thing is, usually people writing anecdotes like this see them as connected to or emblematic of other experiences they and others have had. So, I think if you consider the evidence as a whole rather than each instance by itself, racial bias serves as a decent explanation for some of the observed effects.
What you are saying is consistent with the author's message: If they did not think they would pass the hiring bar, then they likely went there to check a box.
Elitism is very much tied up with racism in America. To think that they are completely separate is exactly the sort of problem that we need to correct.
I'm not sure that's a useful measure in the direction you think it is.
I have a few friends in academia here in .au - where the higher education system has been systematically defunded by a series of governments on both sides to the extent they're pretty much totally reliant of foreign students paying "full fees". I've heard stories of teachers being told they will be fired if they do not pass foreign student - even if their course attendance makes it blatantly obvious they can barely speak/write english and their handed in course work is blatantly plagiarised and/or ghostwritten. "Not failing" enough students looks a lot like poor academic standards and/or practice from where I sit.
(And it's quite likely a signal of endemic institutional racism as well. Duke don't enroll "the sort of student" who doesn't get private tutoring or who needs to, for example, work a part time job to support themselves through college. Which is why they're not a "HBCU"...)
You don’t have a clue about Duke and the students there, please stop speculating. Many of the kids work while there, most never had a tutor, and all of them are normal average Americans (and foreigners) in every way.
I have no problem believing that there is bias and systemic issues in tech hiring. But you're right, looking at the school rankings shows some problems in the logic.
"Hooli didn't treat a low ranked school as well as they did an extremely high ranked school, must be racism."
It's more about false pretenses, and thereby racism (or, at best, massive negligence and lack of self awareness)
I could agree that more recruiting resources should be dedicated towards higher ranking schools, but food scraps and half-hearted presentations just for PR points falls wayyy below just "lower resources".
Would you rather just not have a company show up, or have a recruiter essentially treat you like a dog?
Note that the article mentions they did drive two hours each way (!!) to give the presentation. Surely that's better than "essentially treat you like a dog."
That's quite a dichotomy. Anyway, it's not about what I think, it's about what the recruiters thought. The recruiters probably thought (perhaps wrongly, I don't know) that they would find fewer good candidates at NC A&T. Remember: they have a monetary incentive to find good candidates.
Fucking thank you. I have no idea why I had to scroll so far to see this.
It’s Duke. They’re internationally known. Against some no-name state university. Of course they’ll try harder for the Duke students. It doesn’t matter if it’s Idaho State University, Oregon State University, or NC A&T, it’s not on the level of Duke.
> I’m sure that the NC A&T event was just so Hooli could check some “diversity recruitment” box.
Amusingly, that's exactly what the "interactive" ADA process is at my workplace - just a check box. I submitted a request with medical diagnosis and links to several third party expert recommended accommodations for it, an HR rep booked a meeting with me, told me in the first sentence that I'm requesting an accommodation I didn't request, and that she's denying it, then the meeting ends, and she writes up an email lying saying I requested something I did't and that they rejected it. All appeals are just met with the claim that I didn't state what accommodation I want clearly, even though I sent links ahead of time to reputable sites listing them.
Never realized that's what it must feel like as a minority to get brushed off and ignored due to who you are.
Stop posting about this online, get a lawyer, and sue. Discrimination against medical conditions is against the FMLA. Otherwise what kind of accommodation did you need?
That's how racism and sexism tends to get brushed over. You report it, the other party opposes, HR (trying to avoid a scandal) tries to convince you you didn't see what you saw. And then your character is compared to the other person to see ranks higher. If you don't have enough character points the blame is somehow put on you.
- leftover food. Really? This is really shitty behaviour; I am all for reuse, recycle; but this is neither the time nor the moment
Independent of that:
- I do not know much about US-Universities, so I checked. Duke is US Top 10, and A&T is not in the Times ranking since it is >600. So to me calling A&T "and a damn good one." is just delusional. Maybe it is a 'not so bad one', but I think things (quality of the University) can only improve if one is willing to see the truth.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
I agree that these rankings can be misleading. Do you know any better comparison of Duke and A&T? Like GRE scores of students having completed an undergraduate degree at that university? I dont know if such data is available.
If you are not going to grad school, you probably won't take GRE. As we all know, Masters are rarely funded in the US which in a way means that less well-off students will attempt to pursue one.
So they deserve leftovers and lip service as opposed to help inspire the students to do better and raise the school to a higher "rank"?
I don't get the ranking system either; it's education, it should be uniform, everyone should get the same opportunities and education and their diplomas should be "worth" the same, instead of it being a pissing contest where the higher ranked ones are only accessible to the rich and those in the "in" group. The US is lacking social mobility in part because of this.
> it's education, it should be uniform, everyone should get the same opportunities and education and their diplomas should be "worth" the same
But that’s delusional, right? Of course diplomas won’t be the same because colleges cluster kids of similar intelligence and motivation. As has been pointed out on this page repeatedly, the kids at Duke are smarter and more motivated than at a typical school, so as a result, the diploma is worth more. And to pretend that Duke is only accessible to rich whites and Asians is a fallacy. I had lots of friends from poor families who had lots of aid and minority friends - the Duke campus is far more diverse than the country in general.
I'm surprised nobody's commented with the first thing that occurred to me: UNC, Duke, and NC A&T. One of these is not like the others. It's NC A&T. Why? It's not race. It's the fact that UNC and Duke are much, much better schools. The top North Carolina Black developer talent is...already at Duke, of course.
Cisco or whoever may have been stopping by NC A&T to tick a box and therefore treated it perfunctorily. The author might also be exaggerating, it's certainly in his/her best interests. We all might do well to avoid drawing any conclusions from anecdote.
That's the point. Saying there's a pipeline problem when you ignore where the pipeline you're looking for is actually located is being silly.
In general there's an extremely strong belief in the bay area that it's not worth considering graduates of schools outside the top as being worth considering.
That's how you end up with entire companies treating the entire middle of the US as "flyover country."
No, the author claimed that NC A&T was "a damn good one [school]".
The author was trying to put it on the same level as Duke/UNC in order to paint a picture that the only possible reason for the perfunctory treatment was racism. But NC A&T is not on the same level. "Hooli" is almost certainly elitist, but this anecdote is not good evidence for systemic racism.
> No, the author claimed that NC A&T was "a damn good one [school]".
> The author was trying to put it on the same level as Duke/UNC in order to paint a picture that the only possible reason for the perfunctory treatment was racism. But NC A&T is not on the same level. "Hooli" is almost certainly elitist, but this anecdote is not good evidence for systemic racism.
Author here. I wasn’t implying that A&T is perceived to be as “prestigious” or highly ranked as Duke. I’m just trying to say that it was certainly worth visiting and worth taking seriously. If you’re looking for black engineers, for whatever reason, it’s reasonable to reach for A&T. Now, you can’t claim a pipeline problem if you’re pretty much ignoring the places where you’re most likely to find your target demographic.
Let’s just drop the words “racism” and other “-isms” since they seem to trigger people and become distracting from the point. What the recruiters did by phoning it in for A&T and focus on Duke was miss out on potentially excellent engineers from A&T and reinforce the demographics found at Duke/UNC. The recruiters made an assumption based on some model they built at Hooli and other companies like it and didn’t do their job, which was to FIND good talent.
I’ve worked at “elite” companies with people from “elite” schools. I’ve also worked with people from no school. There are smart people all over the place, so we don’t need to look at the same 10 schools and ignore the people who didn’t take out a $75k student loan.
Thanks for the explanation. Yeah, I absolutely agree that as a society we should stop placing so much emphasis on "prestigious" schools and using that as such a strong filter.
That being said, you could say that recruiters might "miss out on excellent engineers by not visiting _____", where the blank is any one of thousands of schools in the US. In this particular case, it seems like an instance of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" – in general, a recruiter is just gonna look better if they recruit talent from top-rated school than from lower rated ones.
To me, the solution is to stop recruiting on college campuses in general if the job in question doesn't actually require a degree in order to perform it.
Yeah, that’s not a bad idea and it’s why I’m such a fanboy of interviewing.io and that whole platform. I don’t think it’s that hard to come up with new interview questions and screen through an anonymous platform.
I just think there’s not enough pressure on these companies to rework how they do interviews, since nobody believes that they’d actually get higher quality candidates.
While school specific recruiting trips maybe drive results for recruiting teams, there is no way to get away from inherit bias. By only recruiting at "top schools" you skip talent that couldn't afford tuition at an elite school and chose scholarships over paying 60k a year. You optimize for who could do well on the SAT in high school, which is inherently a product of privilege and who could pay to study for the test and even knew it was a road block (I didn't realize the SAT was important until friends that went to "good schools told me to study for it. In school I was always told you couldn't study for it). Systemic doesn't necessarily mean any particular individual is biased. The entire way we conduct business is.
On the margins, SATs are a "fairer", harder to game metric than most of the others.
Yes, rich people can put their children through test prep courses. However, the differential impact is much less than what they can do with grades or even worse, extra-curriculars.
A bright, economically disadvantaged teen can do very well on a standardized test. That same teen has no way of doing an impressive non-profit over the summer in another country, as many wealthier Ivy League applicants do.
Exactly! Every time someone brings up discarding standardized testing for college admissions, they ignore how the remaining admission criteria can be even better gamed by the wealthy and upper middle class. Standardized testing may be imperfect, but its one of the few ways an exceptional student from a less well off background can distinguish themselves.
Then why do minorities such as Indian Americans and other Asian Americans do so well in tech? Is it systemically biased for Asians? Where in the world do they do this correctly, by the way? What country or nation in the world has bias figured out so well that they have perfect proportionality among all races and sexes among all career paths?
The majority of Indian and Asian Americans you see in the US are self-selected to be the richest and most successful ones from their country. Those who don't come from rich families, those who didn't go to the top schools in their country, are much more likely to just stay home, instead of get sponsored by their families to go to the other side of the world to search out the best opportunities.
> The majority of Indian and Asian Americans you see in the US are self-selected to be the richest and most successful ones from their country.
For Indian and Asian Americans, “their country” is the USA, and especially for Asian Americans, it's not uncommon that was true of their ancestors for several generations.
>> The majority of Indian and Asian Americans you see in the US are self-selected to be the richest and most successful ones from their country.
This is absolutely not true for "majority." A significant minority of them, this is probably true about, but a cursory review of how Chinese-Americans arrived to this country will probably dispel this rumor fairly quickly.
54% of Chinese Americans have a Bachelor’s or higher, 50% for foreign born. Things have changed in the last 30 years. Trust me when I say 50% of Chinese in China do not have a university degree.
Hmm, international students have to pay a full ride. So maybe you'd say that the immigrant population is roughly the same caliber as the portion of the native population that is too successful to qualify for financial aid.
The answer is probably complicated. I'd guess that India pushing tech in their education system is one factor. Indians and Asians are also a numerous and growing cohort, whose families are immigrating from higher populated regions. Their families may also encourage their children to go into tech. And the racist stereotypes these populations face are likely very different than others, such as African Americans.
It has nothing to do with India's education system.
It's that if you are Indian, you will not be allowed into the US unless you have a bachelor's in something leading into some high paying occupation. In fact, your odds are pretty bad unless you have a master's from an American university.
> Then why do minorities such as Indian Americans and other Asian Americans do so well in tech
Because for Indians and other Asians, doing well in tech is one of the main ways of becoming Americans. If we kicked out all the current black people and then had employment-based immigrant and dual-intent visas as the main route for blacks to enter the country and start the road to citizenship, then once there were Black Americans again, they'd seem like a pretty darn successful demographic.
> What country or nation in the world has bias figured out so well that they have perfect proportionality among all races and sexes among all career paths?
All career paths is probably a bit of a strawman. I doubt you'll find anyone here who expects same number of men and women in every job. The more dangerous ones will always be disproportionately picked by men and that's ok.
I was 100% on board with the "it's just a pipeline problem" idea until I started interviewing. The more I interviewed, the more I saw how sourcing/recruiting works, the more hiring decisions I witnessed being made, the clearer it became that tech hiring is incredibly subjective. That subjectivity gives room for all kinds of bias to creep in at all the different points of the process.
People get upset about the idea of unconscious bias (I suspect they resent the implication that they're secretely racist or sexist) but it's very real. It doesn't have to involve the person's identity. Bias creeps into your decision-making when you're having a bad day, or when the candidate reminds you of a person you don't get along with, or when they just rub you the wrong way for some reason. It's very easy to dress it up as objectivity. You're just grilling them on the technical details, holding them to the company's high standards, being a bar-raiser, something like that. The reverse is also true - you cut people slack because you like them without even realizing what you're doing.
Recruiters devote the most time to candidates they think have the best chance of getting through the interview process. The interview process tends to be bullshit and easily gamed. Industry candidates who have proven an ability to make it through a similar hiring process will be given preference over those who haven't. Student candidates at schools who know the score will be given preference over those at schools that don't play ball.
Referalls cause a slew of problems. The way hiring decisions are made cause a slew of problems.
This may come off as bitter. I am bitter - not about being rejected, but rather about the people I've had a role in rejecting over the years. Industry candidates who were obviously good at their jobs but terrible at the interview dance. Student candidates who were obviously smart and ambitious but only became aware of the types of questions they would be asked a week or two before the interview. Working with and reporting to cruel and selfish people who excelled at an interview process that's so convinced it's objective and meritocratic that evaluating soft skills isn't even considered.
It's so widely understood and accepted that software hiring processes are bullshit, but for some reason the minute people start talking about the impact of that bullshit on diversity... "it's a pipeline problem."
It is appalling how poorly NC A&T was treated here and I think we all need to be having this conversation, but at the same time you can't just ignore the fact that Duke and UNC are just in a totally different league in terms of university rankings, so it's not surprising that they're getting the red carpet treatment.
For the record I think university rankings are stupid, and the college application process is certainly no meritocracy (an unremarkable high school classmate of mine got into Duke with a 3.4 GPA despite being rejected at our state's lower ranked state schools - she came from a family of Duke alumni). But it doesn't surprise me that companies engage in this university elitism, as sad as it might be.
It is entirely possible for there to be a pipeline problem, and also for behavior like the one described in the post to bias recruiting. Two things can be true.
after spending exactly no words refuting pipeline issues. I'm left to conclude that the author feels the two explanations are mutually exclusive and that by giving an anecdote about one, you can determine the other isn't real.
Do you consider the treatment of NC A&T by Hooli to be disrespectful? I certainly do.
The treatment looks to me like people (or the firm) felt obligated to show up but not obligated to put much effort in or to expect to recruit anyone. If they are running a recruiting event with little expectation of recruiting, does that not agree with the article’s view that the event was solely paying lip service to diversity.
I checked the world rankings by CWUR https://cwur.org and it's below second-tier universities from my country which are all pretty low down the list to begin with.
Nevertheless if the details of this story are true this company might have well not bothered visiting.
Whenever I set a benchmark for tone-deafness someone eventually swoops in and makes me re-evaluate it.
I went to a school that’s definitely not ranked near 10 like Duke (didn’t get into Duke) and was also ignored by the $COMPANY despite being in the same region and being the authors alma mater.
What, exactly, do you think my class of CS grads should do when recruiting?
People are too comfortable. Your life exists in a tech bubble where your biggest annoyances are the most trivial things (my Tesla panels don't line up, ios does this annoying thing, someone said something rude on twitter)
Techies are so coddled that the very idea of interacting with a person with a wildly different background and communication styles is anxiety inducing, so they find a way around it.
The slights won't stop until you leave the comfort bubble, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Let's not pretend like it's just the tech industry though, which is actually more meritocratic than most. For example when it comes to diversity and inclusiveness, high finance and management consulting make the tech industry look like a UN convention. They pretty much exclusively recruit at Ivy league equivalent schools, which are composed of an absurdly disproportionate amount of kids from wealthy backgrounds (any middle class kid who gets accepted to an Ivy probably got a substantial scholarship to their flagship state university).
> Techies are so coddled that the very idea of interacting with a person with a wildly different background and communication styles is anxiety inducing
You're saying recruiting from different backgrounds (e.g. small town god fearing republican) could give my developers anxiety?
I'm guessing this wasn't in the CSE building though... I remember going to career fairs at UW - it was a shit show. Nothing remarkable ever showed up. The line for Amazon being a mile long and a guy just pitching resumes into a shredder. As far as I know, the ones for the CSE department were better - of course.
I dunno, the idealized Uber driving career sounds like something a student could do as a side job. That's how IIRC Uber started off as, but it quickly became a more-than-full-time job for a lot of people.
Go browse Blind for a few hours and you'll see how people really feel about these issues. I know some of the comments are in the minority, but even then, some of the comments are straight up vile.
When I was coming out of school, non-prestige schools (and locales) were simply left out of recruiting altogether. I graduated literally first in my class year, with a BS in CS and Business Administration minor... and wasn't pursued at all. Meanwhile, I already had a software engineering career going, enjoying the setting and challenge as well, and I wasn't particularly concerned at the time. I had developed a skill set spanning both programming and computing center operations (having started there), and I was pretty invaluable in my group from the outset, and the recognition was really valuable to me.
So, you'd think that management in my group (at least) might consider panning for additional nuggets in the same stream (top performers at lower-prestige schools), right?
No.
The hiring manager did recruiting trips where he wanted to travel. New York. Hawai'i. Etc.
He'd hire one candidate from each locale, apparently to justify the trip. Attractive female candidates didn't even have to meet the official policy constraints (a Sociology degree is not CS, engineering, or even BA, sir).
Eventually, I got recruited elsewhere not by any standard channel but by a personal friend.
Not everyone is born into resources. I had to both support myself and put myself through school. That constrained my choices and forced me to be resilient in ways peers my age didn't need to be. Employers who hire by formula completely omit my kind.
What I struggle with when it comes to claims of {whatever group} bias as a cause (the correlation is easy, but I stress "cause") for why any given industry or sector of the economy doesn't represent a desired mix of group attributes is this: There are millions or even tens of millions of actors involved in these economic models and if group attribute bias is driving these hiring or promotion or pay decisions then that means, by definition, that the motivation of bias is overriding the motivation to optimize for value (whether it be NOI for a mature business or speed of market capture for a new one).
So what I don't get is, if everything else is equal between two candidates except for a) their contribution to value and b) their group attribute, how is it that so many actors choose b and leave a on the table thus knowingly performing poorer for shareholders and risking failure at the hands of competition purely because of a group attribute bias?
I get that there would be some actors that would choose bias over value. But how is that no one break ranks. Wouldn't there have to be a massive amount of collusion and coordination to make sure that every founder and manager from every entity all agrees to do this? Because anyone that breaks from the mold would end up benefiting financially.
I get that this perspective undermines the popular narrative, so go ahead and down vote if you think my intention is to do that. But that's not my intention. What I'm looking for is a rational description of how the economic mechanics work with a popular narrative about bias against what is also a popular narrative that humans are greedy?
Check out the Dan Luu blog linked in the first paragraph of the article [1]. He tackles exactly this and does a really good job at explaining it and citing sources.
I might butcher this, but there’s an excellent part in there where he takes a look at the papers that showed discrimination in sports and how teams that discriminated less, actually had an advantage and performed better. For decades, teams were hiring less qualified white players and actually were leaving money on the table. Looking at sports data is nice because there’s tons of it and it’s easier to evaluate “employee performance”.
The issue with ignoring those NC A&T students was that those recruiters didn’t even bother evaluating them to see if there were a few rockstar developers in the group. Had they given them a fair shot and evaluation, we might have made better hires overall.
See all of professional sport in the US before 1950, and what professional teams look like today? How come none of the pre-1950 teams simply figured they could completely dominate their respective leagues by just not ignoring all the "value left on the table".
The story in the article about how the Duke university students were wined and dined, given direct recruiting contacts and wooed, and the A&T students were given the previous days leftovers and NO recruiter contacts isn't some aberration. It's happening right now, this year, literally leaving all that talent on the table.
I wonder if there’s some self-fulfilling prophesy with the recruiters.
If they put forth a half-assed effort at a “lesser” school I have a feeling the best and brightest at that school would feel that and be less than receptive about working there. Meaning they only get serious inquiries from less-than-stellar recruits leading hiring managers to feel that school isn’t worth more effort.
If I show up to dates in pajamas it seems odd to come to the conclusion that my dating pool doesn’t meet my standards
I went to a large state school, Rutgers, and have worked both with people from Ivy League schools and other state schools.
You could swap out UNC and NC A&T with "Ivy League" and "State School" and you would effectively get the same story. And yes, 100% there are tech companies who put a premium on Ivy League vs non-Ivy League based on my own personal experience with recruiting.
Dan Luu (mentioned in the original article) has previously talked about this along the lines of (paraphrasing): "I went to #25 of the top 25 schools. Friends of mine, who were better potential hires, went to #26 and got substantially fewer offers and the offers were lower quality".
If there are biases in how companies treat you based on solely the university you went to, I find it easy to believe that there could be other biases as well.
NC A&T has an average SAT score on par with any random flyover college. Yet I don't see any tech recruiters making the trip out to Bemidji State. The fact is that students at HBCUs are significantly advantaged in recruiting compared to any comparable college.
I don't see how SAT scores would indicate the level of engineering talent at a school in any way. There in plenty of racial bias in standardized testing.
This statement is exactly the sort of attitude that needs to be thrown out the window if we want to make real progress addressing the racial gap in tech.
"I don't see how SAT scores would indicate the level of engineering talent at a school in any way"
Inability to figure out why IQ might be correlative with engineering ability (as it is with practically any performance measure you can name, reified by over 100 years of exhaustive data) is indicative of a failing of reasoning on your part, not a problem with the argument.
I do agree with you that in order to address the "racial gap" in tech we would have to ignore most metrics that would predict tech aptitude.
There are a lot of people here reinventing Sabermetrics.
Go on, read Moneyball, and consider that the selection criteria from top-ranked universities may be low-quality indicators of success at actually getting things done.
In India I've seen bias against different groups, regions, religions, languages etc. in hiring, promotions. The only difference is that everyone has bias against everyone to a level that one can't point out which group is more biased. It evens out I guess
Maybe it's the style of the article but I'm not sure I get the point. Is the complaint that tech is "too white"? If so, that doesn't seem true. Look for example at Google's own internal reporting: Whites are only something like 55-60% of the workforce, with Asians at 35-40%. Once you account for population totals overall, Whites are underrepresented. And I'm sure the same is true at Microsoft.
Is the point then that there just aren't many Blacks? Are Asians in the tech industry not part of the "minority" in the context of this conversation? Sorry but I'm losing track too quickly of what is even being discussed.
when 36% of google can be asian, majority coming from a different country and most probably a much poorer per capita income then anyone in USA. I don't really think anyone was discriminating, go to any top tech school and see the percentage of people by race and you'll pretty much see the same in companies. if anything there's a supply shortage of tech talent I'm pretty sure they don't need to discriminate if someone is good enough
As someone just starting to grow a development team (currently four people) in Denver CO, I’m already thinking about how to build a diverse group. Does anyone have any resources, books, or maybe just some plain common sense advice to recommend?
I’m not really one to ask about this, as I don’t hire people and am white so can’t really give any context to this recommendation, but you could ask the people involved in Juneteenth Conference for help? It was founded by a Black Microsoft engineer, so I’m sure their network has some people with the right stuff for your needs, and I’m sure they also know some good people of other backgrounds too. We all can help diversity directly by recommending our friends to each other, when appropriate.
Also, diversity isn’t only about race, although it is also about that. It’s also about equal access. @AccessForAll on Twitter can probably help you much better than I can in that area.
Be prepared to train people. This goes for any job really, some jobs you'll be lucky that you're fishing in a big pool (say, Java developers), but a lot of jobs are more specialized. Have a good onboarding plan. Hire on interest and eagerness, not on current CV / skills.
I don't think building a diverse group is a reasonable goal. You should try to build the BEST group you can. If you do that right, it might turn out to be diverse.
From personal experience: Don't hire just to tick boxes. It will cause resentment, insecurity and reinforce stereotypes.
Go out of your way to find underrepresented people (small town girls?) but raise the hiring bar slightly to accomodate for the interviee process error bars (if you're looking at a larger sample with a lower average using an error prone measuring device you'll get more people over the bar due to measurement error).
Practically companies outsource the recruitment process to schools. To get in a top school you need to have passed certain filters so it is more likely that talent can be found there. It's applicable is any country not just USA and in sports as well.
It's a hierarchy building system that works but of course it's not perfect.
If you are presuming that untapped talent exists in lower ranking schools on a large scale, companies would shift their recruiting strategies because people from top schools require much higher starting salaries. Leading companies recruit from top schools to remain in the front.
The hypothesis that some groups (black, women, lgbt, etc) are systematically marginalised is not compatible with capitalism. While it has an element of truth due to the in-group preference (which a very natural phenomenon - even trees do it) in a ruthless market companies which discriminate are at a loss - they loose star employees and eventually their leading position. If huge untapped potential exists in the marginalised groups this would create a market opportunity: companies could only hire from these groups and outperform the others. I don't see this happening.
I make it a point to not be in SV, but I work for/am applying for companies based out of there.
Short answer? Yes. Especially if you have an accent. Less so if you don't, however I face plenty of exactly what the author speaks of when I went to my predominantly black college next door to a powerhouse technology school
In case you're genuinely asking, the answer is yes and I don't know why it wouldn't be. There are so many reasons that a high school math team would only be filled with Asians and white males and "because there's a lack of qualified minorities" is at the bottom of that list. Maybe there aren't enough minority students encouraged to engage in STEM activities or maybe toxic people like you make them uninterested.
No, Asian-Americans count as minorities when white people want to throw them under the bus (Kung Flu, China Virus) but not when we're talking about unsuccessful-due-to-discrimination minorities, and thus earn the ire of white people that way, too.
This way the conservative and liberal prejudiced people can both hate that group equally, and for different reasons.
I remember in high school my mom forcing me to join the math club, as she knew the teacher there. There were mostly Asians there. I don't think you could have paid most kids to be on that most unpopular of clubs. I stayed for as long as I had to in order to please Mom, then bounced. Other kids, if they were popular, were probably having a much more enjoyable high school experience -- a lot more black kids were in this 'popular' social group than in math club-- guess what -- completely by choice! And guess who I envied more and was denied entrance to -- yes the cream of the social crop. I guess you would like to find those Asians who just happened to like math for some nerdy reason, strip them of their jobs and give them to whomever you consider to be a minority/victim?
I had to practically threaten my best student (a female) to get her to go to a programming competition.
At which she proceeded to beat 80% of the teams by herself by answering 4 of the 10 problems outright. And then the rest of the team answered 2 more. They did quite well.
Her response: "That was fun. I'm pretty good at this."
<facepalm> Yeah, that's why I made you go.
I didn't shove her there because she was a female, I shoved her there because she was BY FAR the best student in my class. And the first time she showed up for a competition prep meeting, it was stupidly obvious just how much better she was than the rest of the team.
Some professor gave all of those students on the team a shove to get them there. Other professors had her as a student. None of them gave her a push to go do the competition. Why not?
That's the kind of thing that fills or drains the pipeline.
And that was college, a point where women finally aren't quite so worried about peer pressure. I imagine if I was teaching high school, I probably would have had to pull her parents in to exert enough pressure to make her go.
Your student didn't want to be involved in programming competitions because they are unglamorous, not because the environment was hostile to her, as your story demonstrates.
My student didn't want to be involved with a programming competition because she didn't know:
1) She was an amazingly good programmer relative to the field.
2) Programming competitions can be fun.
It's MY job as her senior to impart that knowledge.
The fact that no other professor imparted that knowledge is a problem--she should have had several professors imparting this knowledge. The fact this was not true shows that such things as "competition teams" are NOT meritocracies.
You said you are tired of this narrative. What's your narrative?
I'm assuming you read the article, but it behooves you to state you did or didn't, since you seem to miss the point.
This article points out there were two recruiting events, with very different approaches. Two sets of engineers, one treated very differently.
Your comments just aren't relative to this conversation. They might be true, but don't disprove anything said in this article. They do seem to indicate you didn't read the article.
This absolutely enraging, but I'd like to also point out that the author's own alma mater is about equidistant from UNC and Duke and was not visited. Why was that? Its absolutely disgusting that they treated A&T's stop this way but what's the excuse for excluding NC State?
NC A&T is an HBCU. The subtext isn't that recruiting teams prioritize top-tier schools --- of course every firm does this. Rather, it's that HBCUs get included in these trips, so that HR departments can report metrics about outreach to URMs ("trips made to HBCUs" are an especially straightforward metric), but when those visits actually occur, they're performed with such disrespect that they lay bare the underlying biases.
> What exactly about the tier of my undergrad and myself should I know?
Since you asked me, for some reason: that none of the rest of us are worried about it, and that some random unnamed company not recruiting there might not be something you need to worry about.
Clearly the company is worried about it - for the record, when I graduated I never got an interview or even an email response from the likely company in the story.
If you didn't understand that a degree from NC State came with less cachet than one from Duke when you signed up, I feel that's largely on you.
If you're worried the rankings which place Duke above your school are incorrect and you believe your CS program was as rigorous and useful as what the Duke students have, I can understand being frustrated by that. File under "life isn't fair."
I don't think anyone is going to defend the company in the story, for all the obvious reasons.
I don't, I'm just intrigued at the fact that someone in their 20s is bothered by this. Will this define who you are ? You probably would have worked at a FAANG post Duke as well. I think you wanted some "recognition" from your family ? Is that it ?
That in and of itself isn’t surprising. Programs tend to be ranked in top 5/10/25/50/100 kind of buckets and that would define where they’re recruiting from when they’re told “get the best” and have to draw an arbitrary line when the talent team have no idea what they’re actually recruiting for.
From what I’ve seen there is a real difference in the rigorousness of the top 5/10 CS depts and then everyone else is relatively the same at large state universities.
Since this is written by a Black person in tech, my guess is that his beliefs are based on a lifetime of being treated as a second-class citizen, and this anecdote was merely a particularly obvious case.
However, like you, I am way of anecdotes and put more faith in empirical studies [1]. So what do the data say? Turns out they align with the lived experience of the author: widespread hiring bias by employers hurting Black people.
This is BS. The study is from 2003 and isn't about elite tech jobs. There is evidence that, nowadays, there is a large bias in favor of women and under-represented minorities in, for example, academia and top-tier tech when controlling for resume.
Note, when looking at this literature: there is a huge publication bias. Publishing a paper that fits the popular (in social sciences) narratives is easy, publishing one that goes against them (like the one I linked) is hard and may well be career suicide. Also, the bar for what constitutes good enough science in these areas is very low.
> Publishing a paper that fits the popular (in social sciences) narratives is easy, publishing one that goes against them (like the one I linked) is hard and may well be career suicide.
The Occam’s Razor explanation for this is that the popular narratives are popular because most available evidence supports them.
> The Occam’s Razor explanation for this is that the popular narratives are popular because most available evidence supports them.
That seems like a bit of abuse of Occam's razor. Narratives are popularized by the general media, not scientists. Just compare how popular the idea that IQ is meaningless and not heritable is amongst the general population and the media compared to those who actually study the topic full time at universities.
Universities and people in them are not immune to pressure. Wasn't Hsu fired partly because he funded research into police shootings that ended up getting a politically incorrect result?
Authors of unpopular results (Rind et al anyone?) often get attacked a lot, their research subject to a disproportionate level of scrutiny and it's very career limitting (or is at least rumoured to be, which is plenty of a chilling effect).
Steve Hsu wasn't fired. He resigned from his position overseeing other people's research. He kept his position as a professor with tenure.
Cesario and Johnson studied fatal shootings by police. Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings. That was only a small part of the case the graduate employee union presented against Hsu. The letter started by faculty[1] didn't mention it at all.
I don't want to get too down into the weeds as my point is that people and the media have a big influence on what science gets done and what is career limitting. That said:
Most of the "case" was nonesense, with the actual letter (which had a fraction of the signatures of the counter-letter) being mostly guilt by association.
> Hsu personally promoted their study as relevant to George Floyd's killing and/or the subsequent protests. But George Floyd wasn't shot and the protests were about more than fatal shootings.
It was relevant because Floy was a police killing. Racial bias in police killings (the vast majority are with guns) was the main thing the protestors I've heard were protesting.
Someone could argue Hsu was effectively demoted but he wasn't even effectively fired. Someone can disagree with the case against him but that isn't a good reason to misrepresent it.
Only a small fraction of the signatures supporting Hsu have any affiliation with his university. And would you care which petition had more signatures if it was the other way around?
The protesters' demands for equity and police accountability aren't limited to fatal shootings or even all killings.
Yes, the person you're responding to made a point about precisely that — available evidence.
The file-drawer effect is real and multifaceted, including political narrative strategy. If you don't think that editors consider this aspect of maintaining their journals' reputations, you are simply naive.
The problem with controlling for resume is that getting a strong resume requires getting those jobs in the first place. That doesn't disprove that there could be a bias against women and minorities that stopped them from achieving equivalent resumes in the first place.
It's something important to think about, but I don't think it holds in the case of beginning-of-career resumes. It's not about getting "those jobs", it's about getting admitted to one of the best programs. That's the filter. You're right that subsequent steps flow from that, generally. Though I would argue that there is much more space in CS / programming for the self-taught and self-motivated than there is in most other fields. Most other fields: you don't have the credentials? There's the door. Try being a biologist without a degree in biology!
Saying you're discriminated against is more of a function of what you are told to perceive. Current generation blacks are more likely to say they are discriminated against than any generation prior.
"Wir haben es nicht gewusst" is what the Germans used after WW2, but part of me can believe it because the world wasn't as connected as it is today.
Today though? It does not fly. People know about it, and if they are not actively participating in stopping it, they are complicit - "not my problem, I don't care, blue/all lives matter, what about these crime statistics, muh freedom", these are all people that know about it but do not care, or they do care but they're on the wrong side.
Wow, that's really fucking terrible. That should have brought up so many red flags. At this point I'm of the opinion that sensitivity training shouldn't be something done post facto as an apology. Give sensitivity training to everybody preemptively. First, sensitivity training is not and should not be a punishment. We should all be at best excited and at worst neutral about expanding our worldview and learning from others. Second, we shouldn't have this weird system where Alice calls Bob out, HR makes Bob do sensitivity training, Bob has some resentment for being embarrassed and Alice still doesn't feel comfortable around Bob.
Also sensitivity training isn't the best name. It practically writes its own insults. Maybe call it something like diversity promotion or anti-racism training. It's a lot harder to opt out to anti-racism training.
We all have blind spots. We need to erase them. Let's do it together.
No diversity training. Minorities already receive positive discrimination in tech companies and hiring in general. Studies around blind hiring have revealed that when names are concealed even less minorities get selected.
Pretty weird that the story doesn't involve him bringing up the problem with HR or other engineering managers. The people who do the main revenue-generating work of a company (e.g. engineers in a tech company, the finance people in an investment bank) usually have a lot more power in an organization than HR / recruiting. So if he didn't do that, does that make him complicit in the racism? Or if he did try and got stonewalled, he should share that, along with the name of the company.
And it doesn't smell right that an organization would risk giving a bunch of candidates food poisoning and getting a lawsuit by serving them day-old catered food. I'm certainly willing to believe it could happen, but 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' - in this case I'd settle for him giving the name of the company so that either others can confirm, or they can rebut.
I've spoken out against HR for dissimilar reasons and found myself out of the job not too long later. I don't blame him for not raising his head at his workplace...
I think you need to spend less time attacking people who bring issues to light, and more time recognizing and agreeing that there is a problem in the industry that needs to be solved.
Attacking the person who is bringing the issue to light makes it seem like one is trying to distract from the issue being brought up, and put blame on the individual for talking about the problem.
My MS in CS in from UNC-CH.
Anybody who thinks the hackers from Duke/UNC consistently outshine the hackers from NC A&T is a damn fool.
I was regularly FLOORED by the skills and raw programming chops from peers at NC A&T. Some of the smartest young men and women in the CS field.
I worked in a small research group at NC A&T. Maybe 10 undergrads. Last time I checked, there were something like 6 MS in CS folks from that group and a couple of PhDs.
When I was an undergrad at NC A&T, we had a weekly colloquium for all CS students. We regularly had alumni from NC A&T and other HBCUs on stage who talked openly about navigating the hiring world, which companies you could expect racism in, and what the working world of programming was like for "people who look like us."
If some shitty recruiter event occurred, we all knew about it.
Want to score some of the best engineers from HBCUs? It's easy. Hire the best ones you can convince to take your mega-FAANG package from. Then send them back every freaking year with a corporate card and tell them to impress people.
I hate these "stupid recruiter" stories. Somebody should get their ass fired.