This is apropos of nothing in particular. It's mainly just for reference:
When tech companies hire people, they're hiring from the pool of STEM college graduates. So, for example, if you read that some Silicon Valley company is 20% Asian, you shouldn't compare that to Asians' 6% share of the population. You should compare it to their 15% share of STEM degrees. When you do that, it turns out Asians are only modestly overrepresented, not hugely overrepresented.
Likewise, if the same company is 6% Black, that's roughly proportionate, not a huge underrepresentation.
Use these numbers as rough baselines to evaluate hiring in tech companies. Someday we can hope that all these figures match shares of population, but until then companies have no choice but to work with what universities produce. That's what this is.
Funny story… the early 20s Chinese woman engineer I work with every day seems to be pretty dismissive of the early 20s black woman engineer on the team. Fascinating dynamic. Barely disguised contempt. ????
Yes, bigotry appears in many different guises. I thought everybody knew that?
How do the two compare for ability? A very capable engineer, regardless of race, might very plausibly be "dismissive" of a colleague of marginal abilities, regardless of race.
This leaves off the H1B path to hiring and citizenship. Many IT related companies are chock full from India. Whole buildings where English is a second language.
More cost controls than quality. When your potential green card is in control of the company, it's a little disincentive to leave or question the work.
Also interesting… the people from India I work with daily are not trustworthy. I keep this to myself, of course, but I assume corrupt and avoid them. Yes… I can tell by their accent rather than skin tone since I have no idea what they look like! ???? Whatcha gonna do? Seeing the brown people hate on each other is fascinating.
Needs more details. What kind of work and at what level, "not trustworthy" how, how are they "corrupt" etc. And you have "no idea what they look like" because they are in India or you are sight impaired or what?
Not denying your claims, but just making claims is insufficient.
Personal experience leads me to be wary. I don’t trust them initially. Maybe after some time working together… otherwise I’m interacting with folks who are not local and so the trust is even more difficult to establish. Perhaps they think the same of me, but I’m the customer so… I win.
KD: you shouldn't compare [20% tech hiring] to Asians' 6% share of the population. You should compare it to their 15% share of STEM degrees.
Hey, that introducing a filter! Filters inherently minimize differences. Sure looks like a debating trick. Why not add another filter to further 'prove' a point? Anyway, let's take a look at that filter.
The share of STEM degrees (15%) to share of population (6%) is disproportionate. What's Kevin's explanation for that? Is he concerned? (apparently not)
Yeah, this is transparently phony and the kind of trick you use when either (a) you expect your audience to be too dumb to notice, or (b) you don't know what you're talking about.
I guess I’m not seeing what you think is phony about this. Help me out here. (Seriously, I’d like to understand your argument.)
It appears the subtext of Kevin’s post is the question do tech firms discriminate in hiring of minorities? At first glance it appears they do not based on the pool of qualified applicants. That seems like all he is saying. There’s obviously a follow up question as to why the pool of folks with STEM degrees is so skewed. But that’s not one Kevin was addressing.
Kevin is ignoring that the percentage of groups who earn STEM degrees isn’t static.
If I saw my group underrepresented in employment in Silicon Valley, that would likely affect my decision to pursue a STEM degree.
If companies want to fix that, they need to be doing it in middle school robotics clubs, not just sitting around waiting for college graduates to knock on their doors.
That's a whole nuther topic, if an interesting one. Also worth noting is that Black people make up 12.1% of the US population and get 6.9% of the STEM degrees. So in this area Asian Americans are getting over 2X the degrees vs their share of population and Black Americans a little over half.
The % of degrees is what matters. For this issue it doesn't matter if every Asian got a STEM degree or only 1%.
I’ve worked in tech for two decades. Nobody I work with has a STEM degree, me included. It’s a bunch of random liberal arts degrees or no college at all. The best programmers are self taught. When I’ve been in the position to hire, I put resumes with a CS degree straight in the trash because they don’t know anything practical and they’re annoying to boot. Besides which, technical positions are a minority of jobs in tech- we need project managers and accountants and HR specialists. None of that requires a STEM degree.
Just racist Kevin bein racist again.
Boo!
https://youtu.be/81AFdWXLNCU?si=M8GrissBAWzo9m9k
Nobody I work with has a STEM degree.
Suddenly it is all explained.
It's weird how, the lazier his blog posts get, the more this comes up as a valid accusation.
There are 12% others. Who are they exactly? Mixed race? Polynesians? Brazilians? Aboriginals (American or Australian)? Aren't we virtually all mixed race in reality?
People going to college, especially if they have to help support family, will go for degrees where they can earn money after graduation. And if they have to work to put themselves through college, then they have to consider work loads. Some programs may have paid internships--but maybe family obligations keep them from taking those.
In some ways, the percents mirror generational wealth.
In order to get a STEM degree, it helps if you go to college having experience with higher math, experimental science, and access to modern electronics. For instance, I helped my son build his first computer three years ago when he was 10, and last summer he upgraded that pc by himself after asking me to buy the parts. He’s also interested in math and science and gets all the enrichment he needs. He’ll likely finish AP bio, chem, physics, calculus, and computer science by the time he finishes high school, and is targeting MIT as his first choice for college before he goes to high school. I teach in a different school district, but my school is a highly performing high school that sends almost all its grads to college. Unfortunately we don’t have a lot of African American students, but the ones I teach all go for STEM programs in college.
The savvy employers aren’t filtering applicants based on the type of university degree they have or even whether they have a university degree at all. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg don’t have degrees. They’re both Harvard dropouts, and they did pretty well. Military-to-civilian career paths also often work great.
Tech companies don't only hire tech (STEM) workers. What percentage of tech company personnel are non-STEM? Sales, marketing, financial, top management?