What a big steaming pile of political correctness. The author interviews a tiny handful of mediocre college students who blame their "color" for not getting hired right out of school by big, glamorous tech companies. Are we supposed to be sympathetic?
I remember my own struggles to break into the tech business, many years ago now. Although white and "privileged", i.e. no cultural barriers to entry, I found it very tough and had to jump through hoops, work my way up from semi-tech to actual development positions. I took night school courses on a credit card and got into debt. I bought whatever gear I could afford and stayed up until 3am writing code, then got up and went to my menial job.
The opportunities didn't just fall in my lap; I had to earn them. No glamorous technology titans came knocking on my door, begging me to come interview. I had to work for everything I got, and God, it was hard. It still is.
This same work ethic applied to everyone; I was on the chatboards in the late 80s, all through the 90s, and the 2000s, and the story is always the same. You have to have the right stuff if you want to build a career in technology -- be smart, creative, have some initiative, humility, humor, etc.
So maybe Black Americans don't get that in their upbringing. Maybe they're not taught to be smart, competitive, hard charging over achievers. Maybe they're not encouraged to be creative, to think outside the box, etc. I don't know. What I do know is, you can't compensate for that by handing people undeserved opportunities.
Affirmative action is a failure; it's nothing but a form of welfare. If Google reaches out and hires under qualified people from Howard or wherever, just to say it's trying to overcome "barriers" and achieve "diversity", that's all doublespeak that in the end means "We will hire a few token blacks because we have extra money. It will make us feel good, and it will fool them into thinking they made it. Whatever. We have to do it."
It's funny, dang. You don't seem to ask all the haters to justify their opinions regarding the NSA. Even though by definition, no commenter could "possibly know" the extent of a surveillance program that is top secret. And let's not touch on 'ranting'; NSA threads are full of those.
In fact, affirmative action is the only topic where you demand ideologic lock-step. If you disagree with my assessment please shut me up: point to 1 comment you have made critcizing a pro-AA position. Because I could go through the threads and produce hundreds of tsk tsk's for anyone who voices anti-AA views. If you can provide me with this one example of being a fair to both sides (and thus worthy of being a moderator) I will officially apologize.
It's an opinion and a set of observations, not an "ideological rant and angry invective". If you agreed with me, would you still call it an angry rant? And yes, I know they're mediocre (in the sense of average, not exceptional) because there's no evidence they've accomplished anything of note, but are merely marketing themselves as raw material for hire to big companies and then complaining that they aren't getting hired because they don't "fit in". That's not what high achievers do.
I'm not sure why you think that this is political correctness. There's a clear representation gap in employment at high-wage jobs for large portions of the population. And, that's a social issue that has been identified. As a society we can then either ignore it or address it.
I get that you have a strong opinion on why that gap exists. And, you have opinions on which things won't work to solve the problem. But, by dismissing the issue as political correctness, you seem to be saying that it's not something that we, as a society, should address.
And, that's fine if you believe that. We can all decide to do nothing. But, as an alternative approach, I'd ask that you try to role-play for a moment that one of these people are one of your family. Would you try to help them? Or, would you tell them to get lost?
I think that we have reached a point where a lot of people have started to view vast segments of population as 'others'. Our society seems to be turning into 'us' vs. 'them', and to me that's problematic. We have double standards when it comes to our family and friends vs. everyone else. Personally, I think that's an awful state of affairs and limits the advancement of Humanity.
>> ...by dismissing the issue as political correctness, you seem to be saying that it's not something that we, as a society, should address.
I'm neither dismissing the issue, nor am I denying we should address it.
>> We can all decide to do nothing.
Nowhere did I state that we should do nothing. I haven't shared my own thoughts on how to solve the problem, which is real.
>> ...one of your family. Would you try to help them? Or, would you tell them to get lost?
Of course I'd try to help them. If a nephew, say, were having trouble breaking into high tech, I'd advise him to start small and work his way up. Get an entry level job in the best and most promising business you can find, and do lots of extra-curricular work either at the business or at home. Contribute to some open source software, and write a couple of mobile apps of your own and put them in the Play Store and AppStore. Create a promotional website that shows off your stuff. Network, network, network, both online and at local entrepreneurial and tech meetups. Go to all the tech shows (free exhibit hall pass, if that's all you can afford) and hand out your card.
>> Our society seems to be turning into 'us' vs. 'them', and to me that's problematic.
I think you're jumping to conclusions. A lot of us do care about making our society a better place for everybody, even if we don't agree with your approach. There's more than one approach, and some approaches are better than others.
The shallow, body count approach advocated by the Bloomberg writer and that Howard U. advisor does not work so well; it's like saying, even if these kids aren't quite up to XXX's standards, XXX ought to hire them anyway because to not hire them smacks of racism. Plus, these kids are my students and I think they deserve to succeed in life.
My approach would be to say, these kids are capable of anything they set their minds to and the only thing holding them back is societal expectations that they're not up to the task and need an extra boost. I set high standards for everyone, including myself, not that I always live up to them. But expectation of great achievement is half the battle. When you've been raised in an environment where the white social welfare establishment has told you all your life that you need extra help, you're going to start to believe that.
Look, I believe that African-Americans are capable of brilliant achievements and there's plenty of proof of that. I don't think they need, nor does anyone else need, what you refer to as double standards. We all should be held to the highest standards of achievement so that we are secure in the knowledge that everyone has faith in us, so we should have faith in ourselves. And that is the basis of great achievement.
Affirmative action is a failure; it's nothing but a form of welfare.
Failure from what vantage point? If you want to keep society stable and peaceful, some degree of welfare is probably necessary, for otherwise, those that imagine themselves to be wronged might just band together and violently take what they think has been denied to them.
That's true, but it might be parts of the reason why those who accept it, accept it.
If you think about the invention of the welfare state by (to simplify matters greatly) Bismarck, then this was quite explicitly to defang the socialist movements that were threating the established social order of his time, and did manage to set the world aflame with the Russian Revolution.
> What I do know is, you can't compensate for that by handing people undeserved opportunities.
How do you know this?
Not that I agree with your framing, but even if I accept it for the sake of argument, that black culture is lazy and underachieving in a way white culture isn't, it still seems to me that if you hand black people undeserved opportunities (leaving aside that the word "undeserved" is a huge stretch here, given that you've just admitted that it's for no fault of their own), they'll move into a culture of good white traits like being smart and competitive and creative, and they'll have kids who grow up looking up to their parents' hard-working, humble, humorous white coworkers at Google.
Not OP, but giving false promise to people is very cruel. A lot of people who do not get into schools on their own merits (for whatever reason) do not do as well. The drop out rate among African Americans is significantly higher. This may be because of the colleges attended, but even in the same college, these differences remain. This doesn't necessarily mean that its caused by different standards for different races. For instance it may be because some students have trouble fitting in or finding the support they need. But it is worth considering.
>> Not that I agree with your framing, but even if I accept it for the sake of argument, that black culture is lazy and underachieving in a way white culture isn't...
That is absolutely not my thesis; you're either wilfully or ignorantly misrepresenting what I said. Some black people do make it in tech; some make it in other fields. They generally do so the way the rest of us do, by hard work. Perhaps harder work, in fact, because of cultural barriers that still exist.
Actually, the parent posting is an excellent example of the extreme conclusions to which people jump whenever the hot potato topic of race comes up. It's a kneejerk response: White man shoots black man, must be racism. Half of inmates in max security prisons are black -- must be racism.
The fact is that black culture itself is diverse and while most blacks do achieve respectable middle class lifestyles, there is an achievement gap that some experience, that cannot be dressed up with canards like "cultural barrier" or "dialectical discrimination".
>> ...they'll move into a culture of good white traits...
Yes, this is the old 1970s era rationale for quota systems. "Such practices are inherently unfair and even a form of reverse racism, but in the long run it somehow magically produces equality." This notion has been long since discredited and indeed these kinds of affirmative action and quota practices may even have prolonged black underachievement. It's just like the failed forcible integration efforts of the '70s. They didn't work because while you can mix ethnic groups, you can't mix economic classes; those who can move, move.
I apologize for ignorantly misrepresenting it. That seemed like an accurate way of rephrasing your claim, "maybe Black Americans don't get that in their upbringing." But I guess I have lost some subtlety.
Anyway, I was under the impression that the lives of minorities in the US is much better today and the correlation between race and class is much weaker today than before the 1970s, no? ("Forcible integration," for instance, brings to mind the Little Rock Nine in the 1950s and the "segregation forever" speech in the 1960s, but maybe you're referring to something else.) How has this been discredited, and in what way did they not work? Sorry if this is a naïve question.
How do you know they're mediocre coders? The article makes zero mention of any coding ability, aside from the fact that some of them were having a hard time locking down offers from places like Google and Facebook. Your biases are applying traits to these kids, all of whom you've never met or had any kind of conversation with.
This entire post is the biggest affirmation of "twice the work" if I've ever seen it.
> I remember my own struggles to break into the tech business, many years ago now. Although white and "privileged", i.e. no cultural barriers to entry, I found it very tough and had to jump through hoops, work my way up from semi-tech to actual development positions
Imagine you actually had cultural barriers to entry to deal with as well.
Imagine you actually had cultural barriers to entry to deal with as well.
Have you considered that the non-Americans that are successful in SV had much larger barriers to break, including learning new languages, and dealing with visa hassle?
For example my girl friend was deported the other day because a border guard (wrongly) though she didn't have the right visas to enter the country we are living in when we returned from holidays. No native has to deal with this kind of administrative nightmare.
Sure. Isn't it the case that relatively few of those folks are successful, even though there absolutely are those who succeed spectacularly?
That seems analogous to what's being claimed here: that the deck is stacked against minority applicants, not that it's impossible for them to be successful (and certainly there are quite a few who are successful).
I remember my own struggles to break into the tech business, many years ago now. Although white and "privileged", i.e. no cultural barriers to entry, I found it very tough and had to jump through hoops, work my way up from semi-tech to actual development positions. I took night school courses on a credit card and got into debt. I bought whatever gear I could afford and stayed up until 3am writing code, then got up and went to my menial job.
The opportunities didn't just fall in my lap; I had to earn them. No glamorous technology titans came knocking on my door, begging me to come interview. I had to work for everything I got, and God, it was hard. It still is.
This same work ethic applied to everyone; I was on the chatboards in the late 80s, all through the 90s, and the 2000s, and the story is always the same. You have to have the right stuff if you want to build a career in technology -- be smart, creative, have some initiative, humility, humor, etc.
So maybe Black Americans don't get that in their upbringing. Maybe they're not taught to be smart, competitive, hard charging over achievers. Maybe they're not encouraged to be creative, to think outside the box, etc. I don't know. What I do know is, you can't compensate for that by handing people undeserved opportunities.
Affirmative action is a failure; it's nothing but a form of welfare. If Google reaches out and hires under qualified people from Howard or wherever, just to say it's trying to overcome "barriers" and achieve "diversity", that's all doublespeak that in the end means "We will hire a few token blacks because we have extra money. It will make us feel good, and it will fool them into thinking they made it. Whatever. We have to do it."