It’s easy to say so and so is bad because they are not voicing in unison the clamor for fairness etc. but in reality all most are doing is buying time and buying forgiveness.
Real change does not happen overnight. It takes years of hard work. You have to start young and follow through for a couple of decades.
Employers barely want to train people they have vetted and hired, so I don’t expect them to put money where their mouths are in terms of building and sustaining the systems necessary to bring disadvantaged populations into the same opportunities afforded others.
It’s like the Chinese bots castigating the US for civil liberties issues while they have re-education camps with millions. It’s a sideshow.
I think this is patently untrue and encouraging training and taking chances on different types of applicants would do a lot to improve this.
As someone with a bit of an odd background and a bit scattered of a resume. I've experienced this stonewalling first hand.
I live in Lagos, Nigeria but visit Silicon Valley frequently and follow the situation closely.
Being near but far, has given me unique perspectives on these type of issues.
I sent my report to 22 US media companies (the ones covered, NYTimes, WaPo, CNN, Guardian, Wired etc) and was essentially blackballed. Thankfully we can self-publish.
I am here in the comments and happy to answer any questions you may have.
thanks!
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/03/tech/twitter-jpmorgan-sla...
https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially...
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article243876977....
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-dropping-coding-term...
These are feel good measure, done to tap themselves on their backs and make it seem like work has been done. But no one is fooled.
On the individual level, I have seen people transform the lives of their families by learning to code.
This is one https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-i-went-from-programmin...
Honest question - Is that a racist term? Doesn't appear to be based on Google search, but I see people removing words with black in them such as "blacklist" so I am curious.
I’m not a Mason so I don’t know if this factual, but that’s the idea.
Of course, someone could be blackballed because they are black—if a particular Masonic lodge had racist members—but it’s not inherent to the concept.
So it depends.
Big tech should stop fronting and you should stop pointing.
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[1] https://quillette.com/about/ the "How can you pitch an article?" question
How do you think they’ll react to an African techie?
[0] https://theoutline.com/post/8104/phrenology-hirevue-quillett...
[1] Phrenology is "the detailed study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities."
[2] https://www.pinkerite.com/2019/07/yes-kevin-drum-quillette-i...
> Some of the legislation championed by women lawmakers, such as the enactment in the early 1990s of the Violence Against Women Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act, are remembered as signature achievements more than a generation later. But other victories were shockingly prosaic, correcting gender inequities that few would now believe lasted as long as they did, from giving women access to credit to ensuring that medical research included women as subjects.
A good example of the kind of prosaic mentioned: most people do not know that the NIH was not required to include female subjects for drug trials until 1993, though it is shockingly obvious that a drug could affect female bodies (e.g. reproductive system) differently [2].
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/how-wom... [2] - https://grants.nih.gov/policy/inclusion/women-and-minorities...
The nature of the dominant classes has changed over time. In the early days of civilization like in ancient Egypt you had the pharaohs who ruled because they guarded the knowledge of when and where the river Nile would flood. The farmers were mere meat robots who were forced to farm in order to pay taxes. It didn’t really matter how educated the farmers were or how free the discourse was.
Today’s dominant classes rely on an extremely complex society to keep things going. You need a highly educated work force equipped with all the latest communication tools and critical thinking skills. It’s not so easy anymore to get away with unfair social structures.
Increasing automation means that a lot of this oppression is simply unnecessary.
As far as I’m concerned we either figure out how to build a more equitable society where every kid has a fair chance at self actualization or we risk actual revolution in the long term.
I prefer to be on what I see as the right side of history same as the people who fought to abolish slavery, give women the vote and establish a welfare state.
Questionable motives, but hey if it moves the agenda, take whatever help you can get. It’s already an up-hill battle.
In the US people today tend to forget the surge of nativist sentiment in 1920 towards... Italians. Or before that... Germans.
Billing Black %, though important, as racial diversity erases all other non-Caucasian groups.
I think this is a lesser form of "all lives matter", because the "applies to other groups" subtext is pretty obvious. I'm not saying that you're saying "all lives matter", just that I disagree for comparable reasons: it's only an erasure of non-Caucasian groups if you interpret the author uncharitably.
I’m pretty sure “racial diversity” here doesn’t mean “not white” but instead means racial division in proportion to the population in context.
If Big Tech/Big Tech Media want to help those communities, they should lobby the government to stop mass incarcerating and start educating their future engineers.
Companies certainly don’t care about addressing the underlying issues, and they can’t have their institution represented on those charts like that.
Going forward, if you can help fix those data visualizations, you are going to be an auto hire. This is how they see the world.
I think we’re just getting started with this stuff, and more breakdowns of the data are coming for all facets of society.
Without media coverage, it is hard for even myself to know of black founders in US tech.
Did you know the founder of the very popular Calendly was black? He lives in Atlanta and is Nigerian but I only got to know of him recently.
I just wanted to list a few names of people "I KNOW" that are doing spectacular things.
I hope more people make more lists of Black founders. We cannot have enough of them.
Overall, African immigrants (like many other immigrant groups) tend to have very high education/economic mobility, due to the selection effect - if you don't have those characteristics, it's hard to immigrate to the US.
But if you lump both groups together as "black", the likely result is that tech companies trying to make up for lack of representation in American born African Americans, will end up filling most of the gap with African immigrants, because immigrants are more likely to have the background tech companies are looking for.
Which is great for immigrants, but does it end up helping African Americans?
You might naively claim that professional basketball has a racist preference for black men, until you remember that black men are vastly more likely to fall into the height and athleticism distribution optimal for playing basketball. There are also industries where you rationally expect e.g. whites and asians to be disproportionately represented.
This is why, despite what you may believe, "race" issues are still of actuality in SV. You would be amazed at what some of the supposedly smart and powerful people in these circles believe when it comes to this stuff.
It's amazing to see so many seemingly intelligent people being such avid science deniers. Just because you've demonized the people who believe something different from you doesn't mean they're wrong.
could you explain what they are? Genuine question.
(Personally, I don't have a position, not being familiar with the literature brandished by either side of the debate. I am, however, aware of the debate's existence — hence this clarifying comment.)