* We hold everyone to the same admissions standard, regardless of race or gender. The grants are our way to create a more diverse applicant pool.
* Hacker School is free for everyone
* We admit everyone who applies who we think is a good fit. No man has ever been rejected because a woman was accepted, so there's no way in which this harms men.
* We auto-generate pseudonyms for applicants, so our initial application review focuses on people's code and what they write, not their race or gender
(I'm one of the founders, and I'm happy to answer any questions folks have about Hacker School.)
To my fellow straight, white males who have rushed here to complain, I find the following particularly relevant:
"I think it’s delightful that these straight white males are now engaged on issues of racism and sexism. It would be additionally delightful if they were engaged on issues of racism and sexism even when they did not feel it was being applied to them — say, for example,when it’s regarding people who historically have most often had to deal with racism and sexism (i.e., not white males). Keep at it, straight white males! You’re on the path now!"
from http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/17/lowest-difficulty-sett...
Does he get fewer diversity points, even though his life experiences are so far removed from that of the white person growing up in, say, southern California, that they might as well have grown up in different countries?
The rub is that on average, people who aren't white have a way harder time in America, hence the need for these types of opportunities. It doesn't matter that one white person may have had a hard life, it matters that systemically, non-white people have many disadvantages that white people don't have.
That's racism... it's sad that you use racism while believing that you are solving it. Please don't help based on the race, help based on the needs.
Edit: Can anyone debate instead of downvote? That's doesn't seems like an healthy way to change opinions...
But if you were a white male, you live in a society where you could probably approach any hacker space or anything else without feeling weird about it, unlike many trans*, queer or black/latin@ people. That's the way they're promoting diversity, by creating spaces where people can feel more welcome/safe, they're in no way denying white people or males.
Despite our own perception of the success of the policy, we received plenty of complaints from both men and women. Ashe Dryden helpfully pointed out to me, when I had the opportunity to ask her opinion, that women on average earn 25% less than men, so really we had just made the program cost the same for women as it did for men.
If women or minorities are discouraged from applying to Hacker School because they would have a hard time paying their living expenses, these grants will help to eliminate that hurdle, thus achieving the goal of more applicant diversity. Needs-based grants wouldn't necessarily achieve that goal. Needs-based grants would also be more difficult from an administrative standpoint as applicants would have to prove their income, which would also invite a regulatory burden.
How exactly does that apply to a program that's created to help groups that have a systemic disadvantage in this country?
We're in an industry where modeling, A/B testing, logging, trending and engineering for redundancy is implicit - except when it comes to hiring apparently.
If a load balancer assumed to split 50/50 was actually operating at 80/20 someone would notice. If a particular demographic were bouncing from the landing page at disproportionate rates, someone would figure out why.
Both problems would be broken down empirically and solved with a thorough post-mortem published on the company blog.
To this point, those same sort of issues applied to hiring have been largely addressed with "We've got to do better" and "The problem is upstream" with barely a word about how things managed to creep so far out of whack to begin with.
It's really refreshing to see admission of an actual (potential) problem and some of brains being applied to mitigate it directly.
Several years ago I had the charter for "game-changing strategies" at Microsoft, and some of what we came up was diversity-related. When I give the quick thumbnail sketch of my career, I sum this stage up by saying "the company didn't really want to change". And everybody nods sadly.
It is refreshing to see an actually objective, fact-based, and mostly well thought out approach to solving the problem.
Strangely, the pushback against meritocracy as a goal and objective measurement as a method doesn't come from the alleged "good old boy" network.
http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug
http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-an...
Another side effect of anonymized applications is that we get to read a lot of funny application names (Beet Manager, Pastry Magician, Bean Pain).
[1] seriously, so many examples, https://www.google.com/search?q=research+bias+hiring+names
It was very strange to me that anyone would focus so much on diversity as much as Hacker School has. So I was looking around their site, and I suddenly found the quote that explains their near-obsession: "We make money by helping companies hire our alumni." Suddenly it all makes sense! Companies need to fill diversity quotas, so they turn to Hacker School to get as many women, hispanic/latino and black people as they can.
Your second conjecture is a bit tin-foil-hat to even address, but here goes: why does it seem strange to you that a prominent organization in the technology community would focus on diversity? Diversity breeds innovation - the more diverse the tech industry, the better it is for all of us (and by all of us, I'm referring to the entirety of the species). Diversity is a worthy goal in and of itself. There doesn't need to be an ulterior motive.
1. American society consists of all kinds of people
2. A lot of those groups are weirdly underrepresented in the American tech industry
3. That means we're wasting a lot of great programming talent at a time when we badly need it.
2. One group is weirdly underrepresented in the American [nursing/childcare/secretarial industry]
3. That means we're wasting a lot of great [nursing/childcare/secretarial] talent at a time when we badly need it.
Does this make any sense to you? If no, your own statement should not either.
And to the third point, the "labor shortage" is BS, this has been debated a thousand times.
Believe it or not, I'm open to being convinced. Care to share what you're basing this statement on?
I disagree with this, it's racist.
> "oh I can't go cuz I don't have enough money to sustain myself"
That's the reason why you should get that grant, not because you are from a different race.
I've no idea what that difference is, exactly, but I do know that you're not allowed to question it under any circumstances.
This is a very simple and pretty inoffensive question, IMO. If your goal is diversity and helping the disadvantaged: Why race instead of socioeconomic status?
By the way, they're not wrong. Racial discrimination has a pretty black and white objective definition, folks, and clicking the down arrow on my or any other post does nothing to change that definition.
It does, however, make this community look bad and knee-jerk-y. Do think before clicking, please.
All this means is that the person doing interview #1, interview #2 and admission decision are biased at the same rate. It doesn't mean that rate is zero.
The proper test - compare admission rates against a truly objective and unbiased measure like a final exam (particularly if students anonymize their names). If gender information does not leak to the grader, bias is impossible.
[edit: Wow, I've clearly made a blatant failure of reasoning - apparently my knowledge of statistics is far less than I thought. I hope someone can explain my error - I'm not afraid of math, so don't skip the details.]
I reiterate - if you truly want to measure bias on factor X, you need to compare to a metric that is blind to X or otherwise known to be unbiased.
I am prepared for the downvotes, keep them coming.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Prejudice_plus_power
Until folks understand this primary principle, most of you arguing for this "anti-white and asian" bias will simply be tools of the status quo. Equality does NOT mean treating all people equally, WHEN ALL PEOPLE DON'T HAVE THE SAME FOOTING, and don't have the same political power (which is conferred from our social and political system).
This said, I'd like to see the results, as I would believe the diversity problem is not as much with hackerschool as it is with the pool of applicants.
