[imglorp]

> in 2013, 4.5% of CS graduates from the top 25 schools were African-American, and 6.5% were Hispanic/Latino.

That's a problem. Hiring corps not only need to screen more applicants in order to find more applicants above their quality bar, but they also need to engage the community to get more kids interested in their fields and encouraged through school.

It's the long view, the generation long kind. Public corp cost accounting idiotry will not support investment like that, so it's up to the private corps.

[protomyth]

Fix the demographics and STEM interest in elementary and pre-K, then we might get a more diverse tech field. Until people start looking at the start of the problem, fixes at the end are limited.

[MBCook]

You're right there are problems earlier, but things can still be improved now while the rest of the pipe is fixed.

[protomyth]

Improved, maybe, but the fundamental problem is at the beginning. If we had a need for concert violinists, encouraging college students to take up violin is pretty late in the game. We need a technical prodigies and the people who can start late are few and far between.

[josegonzalez]

Why is that? Just a personal observation, but I only actually started to understand programming my junior year of college and would find myself to be pretty technically proficient, and I know plenty of terrific developers who started of programming after a career in something completely unrelated (selling phones, painting, vet school).

Yeah it's hard to start learning how to program and become efficient at it, but there is no reason that we can't attack the issue at later stages in the pipeline.

[protomyth]

Because by the late stages, people's loves and hates have already been defined. Things are cool or "I don't like X" has set in. If you don't love STEM early, you won't want to do it late. Attacking the issue later in the educational pipeline is like adding a cron job to restart the web servers because of crappy programming. The correct answer is to actually fix the problem. We've tried enough patches by now and it disgusts me that we are talking about diversity in tech when we are not talking about diversity in pre-K and K-8.