Having done many interviews around silicon valley, the demographics of companies definitely seem very ... themed. Not necessarily monochromatic for a particular ethnic group, but a small set of ethic groups usually overwhelmingly represented.
And at that, this wasn't a thing that seemed particularly biased towards one theme.
Brazilians. I know of one group of ~4 that basically follows the leader (a Director / CXO type) to every position. Whenever he moves, they all inevitable end up at the same exact company within 1-3 months. It's actually impressive how consistent their resumes are going back a decade or so.
Maybe not the exact place for this, but after a few years of working with "near-shore" development groups in Latin America, I can't believe how white the leadership is. For all who think the US is #1 awful place for non-White folks, just look at Brazil.
At a large semiconductor company, the same could be said for many groups: Chinese hiring other Chinese, one group hiring native Americans mostly, others with Hispanic origin…
Yes, this was a local software engineering manager who is "Native American" as in, a native people original to the land, aiming to hire other Native Americans as well as majorly minorities.
As a whole the company reports figures showing mixed diversity within the company, but it is really sort of segregated inside because folks don't really mix within immediate groups or teams. So if you're from a typical Caucasian descent, it's hard to adjust within groups like that. One reason is because it is hard to connect - business thinking is different, world views, work ethics, communication style... so I don't blame folks for hiring similarly. For groups when you "need to get things done" it makes sense, but for creative thinking and problem solving, you really should have diversity within the team itself.
Which fabs are in NM other than Intel's 11x (and maybe Sandia)? Wikipedia [1] doesn't list anything, but I also don't see many smaller, exotic technology fabs on there. I'm really curious where they could site a fab on the Navajo reservation because of how profoundly inadequate most of the infrastructure is even for typical American households, let alone a fab.
I worked for the same large semiconductor company and saw the same thing play out. It was hinted to me by some mentors that I was in a good position because my manager was White as opposed to Indian or Chinese.
Cisco is famous for being sued for all sides. They let go of middle-aged white people (who sue) and then hire young Indians they can underpay (who also sue.)
I mean I'm kinda glad they sue instead of roll over and take the pay. International hiring at lower pay is a capitalist strategy you see everywhere.
I watched a Business Insider video a while ago about (of all things) mushroom farmers somewhere in the US. They bluntly admitted they lost tens of thousands of dollars worth of crop because they couldn't find staff. They couldn't find staff because they only hired south-American people, and they only hired south-American people because they were cheaper.
Very long story short, under capitalism, employers don't want to pay their staff.
> There's only one side (leftists) and one party (Democrats) that are arguing for more immigration and open borders in the US
This is only true if you refer to extreme left/democrats and extreme right/republicans.
Moderate democrats (the ones usually in control) routinely set limits on immigration and refugee issues.
Moderate republicans, who were usually in control pre-trump, are very pro-immigration (it keeps labor market competitive).
Note that union-oriented folks often times are anti-immigration. Union folks at the national level are currently largely aligned with democrats, but their members have made a massive shift towards the Trump-flavor Republican Party.
To close, I don’t think that the political line is quite as clear as you seem to propose. The extreme left may want few/no immigration limits, and the extreme right may want extremely strict immigration limits, but the moderates from both sides want healthy immigration with limits, and the specifics of the limits are the main issue of contention.
Said another way, the moderates from both sides are closer in ideology to each other than to the extremist sections of their respective party/ideology.
I don't think it is. As a member of an ethnic and religious minority, I keep a close eye on white supremacist and neo-nazi groups (it's easy these days, they're all on Telegram) and they talk about accelerationism in exactly that context.
If someone hires a person based on their color, that's wrong regardless of who's doing it. This includes let's say for example an Indian that hires a white person just because they're white.
> If someone hires a person based on their color, that's wrong regardless of who's doing it.
Let's say a company is set to hire 1,000 employees. For the first 900 hires, they intentionally exclude white people. Should they, then, make up for this intentional exclusion by then prioritizing white people in their hiring? Or should they correct the problem by giving those who were intentionally excluded priority?
In other words, should the racist status quo be allowed to continue, or should it be intentionally corrected?
Why is it a strange hypothetical? Extremely similar situations were actually quite common historically. Many, many ethnic groups have been intentionally excluded from many types of jobs over the years. It's not just a hypothetical: It's a past reality that has real-world impacts that last through today.
Have a specific company done what you were describing in your example or was this a societal level ill?
Also the way you phrased your question (“should the racist status quo be allowed to continue, or should it be intentionally corrected?”) made it sound like you weren’t interested in having a discussion, thus the other comment.
Yes, of course, many companies in the U.S. had blatantly racist hiring practices that were eventually made illegal. Those practices have not always been corrected, though, and the racial demographics of many companies and positions have not shifted very much. This is a broad societal issue, as well as one that can be traced to individual companies.
Can you get rid of unnecessary discrimination by continuing to discriminate, no.
Punishing people today who had no input into situations in the past, only because of a characteristic they have that they can not alter ... that's just breeding more resentment.
A teenager of my acquaintance was accepted last minute to an educational opportunity, it was well over-subscribed. When they got there they found there were actually places on the course which were not filled. The reason? Those places were only for people of the opposite sex. Students missed the opportunity due only to their sex. How is that fair for those students who missed out?
In an ideal world, it would be. However, because of mainly the US' political system, people of different demographic backgrounds - like class, race, family wealth, etc - will not have access to the same education as others.
In an ideal world, everybody (in in this case the US) would have access to the same standard of living, the same standard of education, and everyone would start at the same point in their career, so that employers can do blind job applications (censoring out an applicant's name, age, gender, etc) and hire on merit alone.
But that ideal is still far away, as is blind interviewing. Especially in tech where people are judged not only on merit, but on personality as well - you have to work with them, after all. And that's when things like classism, racism - not even the morally indefensible or conscious type - show up.
This isn't what AA/DEI policies do though. Working with your analogy AA is this:
You have two kids a boy and a girl. You give the boy a cookie, and the girl gets nothing. Eighty years later your adult grand kids buy cookies and give them to all the little girls in they neighborhood and explicitly exclude the boys because their great aunt didn't get a cookie.
This fixes nothing. The original girl got nothing, the later generation girls get a preference though there's no evidence that they were discriminated against in their own lives or even if they lack cookies. And later generation boys are harmed regardless of how deserving they are of receiving a cookie.
Your non-analogous analogies are strawmen and we really don't need to make analogies or strawmen if we want to discuss AA, DEI, or discrimination. We're all adults and are able to communicate without using analogies or metaphors.
> the later generation girls get a preference though there's no evidence that they were discriminated against in their own lives or even if they lack cookies
If you're going to talk about generational effects of racial discrimination, then, the answer is, yes, there is plenty of evidence that racial discrimination has a profound impact between generations, even if the primary racism was against a previous generation.
Nobody admits averages or hires averages, they admit individuals and hire individuals. For any given individual you can't say that they suffer any disadvantage simply by way of being a member of a particular identifiable group.
Anyone who uses group metrics to include or exclude an individual is just being racist, sexist, or some other -ist.
Can you explain how correcting a past mistake is racism? Imagine you have two kids, and you only give one of them a cookie. Should you make up for it, by giving the next cookie to the kid who didn't get one? Of course!
> Can you explain how correcting a past mistake is racism?
Because its not correcting a past mistake. But rather make new ones that inevittably are going to lead to even more resentment. And also hurting the ones you are supposedly helping by making them question whether they got in through their abilities or through diversity points. Which can lead to quite a large reduction in their self confidence.
I would call the cookie example irrelevant to this.
Treating someone differently because of their race, no matter if positive or negative, is racism.
2. It will cause "doubt" among people who benefit.
In essence, your first argument is about further benefiting the people who are already in an advantaged position. And your second argument is blaming people who would benefit. Yikes. That is some twisted logic.
Thats not the reason I am against racism, that is a consequence of racism. The resentment will lead to racism against the people who benefited from the racism. You can't break that cycle with more racism.
> 2. It will cause "doubt" among people who benefit.
It will lead to a lower self esteem, which leads to less likely to negotiate for high salaries, which leads to a wage gap between different races in the same profession.
There are MUCH better ways to get a "better" ratio, like expanding the pool of applicants of underrepresented groups. For example, through advertisments in areas where such people could be located. I have nothing against that.
What I have a problem with, is justifying racism in the name of fighting racism.
> In essence, your first argument is about further benefiting the people who are already in an advantaged position. And your second argument is blaming people who would benefit. Yikes. That is some twisted logic.
I don't see how correcting a problem is violence. It's more like giving a kid a cookie when they didn't get one. Sure, the other kids will want to keep getting all the cookies, but that's not right, no matter how much they complain.
Except it’s not the same kids. The kids who used to get all the cookies have already grown up. You’re punishing different individuals, just because they have the same skin color as someone who had unfair advantages in the past.
I'm strongly generalizing here, but the overall population statistics might mean that minorities hiring minorities is more of an outlier than white people hiring white people.
In a predominantly white society, it is perfectly conceivable that you'll hire predominantly white people even if you are completely unbiased, purely because they are strongly over-represented in the population. White people hiring white people is thus not a statistical outlier, and while there is definitely nepotism going on in this cadre as well, it's less easy to pinpoint just based on the race.
On the other hand, you will likely have to go out of your way to build a team mostly staffed by minorities unless there's some other bias, e.g. that minority is over-represented in your specialty. In this case, if you have a team purely of a homogenous race that is otherwise a small minority of the overall population, it is more of an outlier. That's not saying there's nepotism at hand, but the likelihood of such a team composition arising naturally without some direct bias is simply lower than in case of a team composed of the major race of the population.
Anything not aligned with the breakdown here is just straight up racist hiring practices - 60% white, 20% hispanic / latino, 15% black, 5% asia (subcontinent & se asia).
I agree with the general sentiment of this comment, but would add that the employee breakdown should match the applicant pool's demographics, not the demographic breakdown at large. For example, to expect a gender breakdown close to 50-50 would be unrealistic in software engineering roles since generally women are less represented in those roles.
Though id love to see this shift (Women in stem!!)
Some companies do go out of their ways however to try and match that 50:50, or to get "equal" representation in races. Which really just turns into being discriminatory hiring, but they'll call it "diverse hiring".
I'm not sure that this isn't bait, but, given enough somewhat arbitrary slicing of the data (gender, age, loose race groups etc.), surely it'd be unlikely that there wouldn't be some biased slices?
It's basically p-hacking: if you come up with enough ways of analysing data, you'll find something "significant".
To be fair, you would need a bigger more representative company. If your slice is CEOs' then that is pre-filtering for a lot of things. Tech role at apple skewed a fair bit, general role less so, a retail apple role thena different population all together.
Amazon possibly has enough employees in the fuller distribution of income / qualifications that would be an interesting dataset for slicing, but of course you will always find rouge slices and while they may have a reasonable explanation othertimes they do not - why are 90% of CEO of a listed companies are >50 years old, 22% of the population is under 18 its unfair they are not represented (lets not get into the number of old people in politics)
I don't think the question of why CEOs are older than non-CEOs is interesting. Highly important roles require suitable experience, which of course is going to bias the sample towards older people.
The problem is that, if the only answer if there's no "reasonable explanation" is to imply the existence of some kind of discrimination, you're going to include a lot of weird things under that category, and often make complex problems appear simple.
Scott Alexander wrote a good article "Black People Less Likely" that discusses a similar idea. There's often possible explanations for local bias, ideas of unfair treatment and rude old white people, but sometimes you hide a lot by addressing at a local level. If what is identified as a problem is present at all levels of the hierarchy from social clubs to CEO positions, it's useless to ask why more xyz people aren't CEOs.
> Or are you suggesting that some races / genders / etc are better at some things than others?
Aren't they? Women are worse at pretty much every sport than men, and NBA teams are very far away from average racial representation in general population.
Even with non-physical activities, asians are overrepresented in many technical areas, and there were/are even lawsuits [0] about discriminating asians in favour of other races in colleges.
> Arcidiacono suggested that the applicant's race plays a significant role in admissions decisions.[8] According to his testimony, if an Asian American applicant with certain characteristics (like scores, GPAs, and extracurricular activities, family background) would result in a 25% statistical likelihood of admission, the same applicant, if white, will have a 36% likelihood of admission.[8] Hispanic and Black applicants with the same characteristics will have a 77% and 95% predicted chance of admission, respectively.[8]
So yeah... chances of getting a male asian programmer are relatively higher than their representation in the general population.
The flaw with this argument is that all the possibly reasonable examples of differences you mention don’t imply that all other observed differences are benign and there’s nothing to be done.
Sure... give all kids the same minimal starting point (schooling). Workplaces should just pick the best candidates, no matter the race or whatever other protected group status they look at.
I live in a former socialist country (we had red stars, parades and a dictator), and considering race or any other non-merit based factor in eg. high school and college aplications would be seen as wrong (and in case of race/gender, racist/sexist). Same for jobs.
This response seems to indicate that you wish it were, which seems like an acknowledgement that it isn't identically distributed. In which case, it seems a bit premature to jump to "straight up racist hiring practices" being the only explanation for disparities between any given field and the country-wide demographics.
> Or are you suggesting that some races / genders / etc are better at some things than others?
No, it seems to be you trying to suggest this. I'm pointing out that there could be alternate explanations besides "straight up racist hiring practices" that could cause any given application pool to deviate from the general population. This could mean anything from small-number statistical sampling fluctuations, to lack of aspirational representation causing a demographic to enter the field, to general structural suppression in society etc etc.
Very few companies are directly in the position to directly influence the development of people who will be in their application pool in several years time.
Couldn't it just be that some races / genders / etc, are just more represented in some markets than others. Has nothing to do with if any of them are better.
In 2019, nearly 70% of doctorate recipients who were U.S. citizens or permanent residents were white. 10% were Asian, 8% were Latino, 7% were Black and 3% identified as more than one race.
Not all of them were in electrical engineering I guess.
It all comes down to the hiring pool. Compare the following two scenarios:
1. You're in a minority group (relative to the hiring pool), and your hiring decisions are skewed towards hiring other members of the same minority group (relative to the hiring pool)
2. You're in a majority group (relative to the hiring pool) and your hiring decisions are skewed towards hiring other members of the same majority group (relative to the hiring pool)
Why would the number of members of your group in the hiring pool change the morality of the situation? Take, for example, a business in a majority black neighborhood preferentially hiring white people. Seems bad. I think I prefer the "historically marginalized" justification more, although I think that has its own problems.
The most charitable interpretation is that they are attempting to increase representation in the pipeline of candidates, such that their unbiased, neutral selection process will naturally produce outcomes representative of their candidate pool.
That’s legal.
In reality, when you have companies literally setting hiring targets on the basis of protected characteristics?
It’s very unlikely that the selection process is neutral to those protected characteristics, which is not legal.
>looks the other way when Indian director has all Indian SDMs reporting to him
I've seen it happen so many times now that I can call it ahead of time. Critical mass is when you get a VP. From there, you go from representational levels to >50% Indian in a matter of months.
Happened at my last company. They hired an Indian CTO and before long, all the management under him was Indian. He basically made life unbearable for the existing leaders until they quit and then brought in someone he knew. Seemed like blatant racism to me.
To be fair: nepotism is rampant everywhere, and has been throughout history. How many groups have you worked in or seen where everyone got recruited from the same set of schools? Where everyone used to work together at some other company?
The difference with what you're seeing is all down to who is allowed to be nepotistic. When south asian engineers were predominantly junior immigrants, you didn't notice anything wrong. Now the casteists are doing the hiring too. But the effect is the same.
Since we're sharing anecdotes and that's good enough for this thread, here's my own:
I'm a white guy - pretty much a typical one. My manager is a white guy - possibly even more typical, follow along North American Dude Stereotypes for both of us.
For most of the last 2 years, he had 8 reports - 3 managers, 3 product managers, and 2 principal engineers (me being one of them).
I was the only white guys out of 8 - the rest were all Indian.
Why?
Because the other 6 were the best people for the job. They applied for it (some external, some internal), and we hired them, cuz they were rad (and still are).
Demographically, that just happens sometimes, including all-Indian reports
If it is, is kept very secret between Indian employees, most American engineers (at least I would) will raise the issue. I don't care how high the is Director, I would just tell him that he is being racist , at his face, if he gets me fired, I would sue the company in a second. I have never seen this non-sense at FAANG in the 7 years I have worked here (Amazon first, then Google).
It’s not a secret? I recall having a discussion on this with a bunch of SV engineers a decade ago at a potluck and almost everyone observed how Indian managers tend to hire Indians at their respective companies.
Oh yeah, I was referring to discrimination in the workplace itself. So far all Indians I have met are amazing people, and I have not seen any type of discrimination against other Indians, otherwise I will whine very loud for sure.
I don't know if it's nepotism, but Changi Business Park [1], a tech hub in Singapore, is nicknamed Chennai Business Park [2], for much of the same reason outlined in this thread.
More like desperate H1Bs that are afraid to shake the boat because one wrong move and they are out of the country. We shouldn't celebrate slave mentality.
Again, I pre-empted these types of debates by saying we can split hairs on why this is.
I am not denying this is the case for some, but also it's not the entire picture. I know plenty non-H1Bs that fit this bill, and there have been plenty of articles written on the rise of the Indian-American worker, especially in the tech sector https://www.southasiamonitor.org/spotlight/unprecedented-ris..., use your favorite search engine for a plethora of other recent articles on the subject.
These scenarios are the case for many Indian people and others working in the US. It's not an edge case. There are no hairs to split when immigration and citizenship status are integral to why people might act the way they do...
It's how migrant families (including my own) always have been here. They have always been willing to put in more, even when they clearly are aware they are being taken advantaged of (by the American standards, of course). I am 1st generation, and I can tell you right now, I would never work 13 hour days every week for years on end without a vacation like my father did. And that's a good thing, of course. But again, my comment was intended to be an observation more than anything.
I've noticed the same kind of trend, except in my case it's not working out the same way. My Indian team mates are happy to diligently put in the hours, but it has been difficult to convince them that they should instead rock boat a little in cases where those hours aren't clearly helping anybody.
20 well thought out hours > 40 hours running tests you know will pass.
It's a pity that discussing cultural differences as things that can be an asset or a hindrance is taboo. I surely have my own inherited hang-ups and it would be helpful to have it pointed out every now and then.
Why paying a decent wage and have a nice work-life balance when there are people in the 3rd word working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week and for pennies?
Worker's rights should expand towards the world, not the other way around.
There's a balance to have. I tried to focus more on tech industry. Tech industry is paying well beyond decent wage. You have to take things in perspective. You are comparing apples to oranges. Again I am not disagreeing with expanding workers rights.
Beyond any of these discussions, I was attempting to make an objective observation: The current status of American corporations value those who will put in more hours, and in general, are less demanding. It's just kind of the facts. Again, we can debate why this is ad nasuem, H1Bs, migrant labor in general, history of labor unions, capitalism, etc etc etc etc. But as it stands today, someone who will tell their boss "yes, I'll get that done", especially after hours or beyond standard expectations will get promoted more often than not. It's just the way it is. It's not a statement of right/wrong.
>> But as it stands today, someone who will tell their boss "yes, I'll get that done", especially after hours or beyond standard expectations will get promoted more often than not. It's just the way it is.
That is…unfortunately, exactly the opposite of what happens more often than not.
More often than not - promotions are accrued through social credit and personal preference.
You will quite often see the hardest working people get passed by for a promotion for the manager’s friend, etc.
Your ‘objective observation’ is…not accurate.
If this was the way it was - we wouldn’t need laws related to racism, sexism, etc in hiring practices.
I don’t know what kind of idealistic fantasy America you’re imagining up, but in the real one that exists on Earth these are serious problems.
There are cases where the one that gets the promotion it's the one that sells themselves the most, instead of the "overengineer".
Being assertive, going straight to the solution and inspiring security is something that boosts a developer's career a lot.
Some people mistake that being a good professional is saying "yes" to everything and putting endless extra hours behind the code. And often that isn't the case.
Attributing characterstics to popultions of hundreds of millions based on anecdotal data from a handful cannot be accurate, just perpetuates stereotypes and doesn't help.
In this specific case sure, most Indians probably wouldn't be offended by being associated with those qualities because they're almost universally positive.
It very quickly gets murky though, since most racial or geographical stereotypes _aren't_ totally positive, and making observations about different groups will usually end up drawing the ire of at least a couple folks.
I agree most are hard working and no complaints, but that isn't necessarily the best quality. I so often have to speak up against BS because my 90+% Indian team is too passive. I'm also an immigrant, so same work authorization concern.
It’s all lip service. Nepotism is rampant at FAANG