[barefootcoder]

I have an honest question for you and others who are directly impacted by this, and would love to hear your perspective.

I work on a software team that has the usual level of diversity, an almost equal mix of East Asian, Indian, Middle-Eastern, and White developers, a few women, and not a single black developer. Here's the problem though... I've been part of the screening and interviewing process and we've only had ONE black person apply, he was an immigrant from Africa. He made it all of the way through the interview process, but did not get the job for reasons that I am unaware of, though I did give him a yes vote as he seemed competent and friendly to me.

Given that we have screened and interviewed hundreds of applicants and as far as I'm aware he was the only black developer to apply, how can we as individuals on the team make a difference to try to be more inclusive?

This has been true everywhere that I've worked. In my entire career spanning > 25 yrs I've only had the opportunity to work with one black developer. He was extremely good, but timid, very soft spoken, and too quick to self-judge, leading to him not very proactive at advertising his successes, which was unfortunate as he was doing great work, but not recognized by the majority of the team. When I later became his manager I would go out of my way to ensure that every major accomplishment of his was widely publicized, but by then the perception had already been set.

It seems to me that the root problem is further up than the hiring process -- it feels like it's something that needs to start at a younger age, encouraging more people outside of the usual circle to consider tech as a career in the first place, but maybe I'm not blind to my own short-sightedness and would love to be shown where I personally can effect change.

[AdrianB1]

You need to better define the problem you are trying to solve. For example in my team in Europe there is no black member; there is no black person in the entire building and just a few in the entire city, maybe none in this kind of job, so I don't consider we are not inclusive by not having a black member in the team. You can have a problem if you are exclusive, but you cannot force inclusivity for the sake of just doing something that sounds good.

What is the goal of inclusivity? What is better for your team, having the best developers or having the most diverse developers? What is the productivity and value of diverse developers versus expert developers? Is a developer more valuable because of the skills or because of the skin color? Would you want to be treated by a competent doctor or by a black doctor? I am not saying there are no competent black doctors, but you make it sound that color is more important than competence.

[barefootcoder]

Diversity brings value by bringing different perspectives to the problems we solve and the solutions we seek. We all have blind spots, and having a broader perspective can help us see more than we would otherwise, even where we’re unaware that we currently cannot see.

[AdrianB1]

That is diversity in experience, culture or opinions, not skin color. You are also assuming that the different perspective is a positive contribution, even if in many cases it just brings more tension because people have very strong different opinions on bikeshedding. The biggest problem is when forced diversity comes at the expense of skills due to lack of supply, which is a very real thing.

Imagine the coal mine next to you that has the target to hire a certain percent of black people, 50% females and 5% LGBT: it would close instantly because it cannot meet the target. But just imagine the value of the different perspective a black coal miner would bring, compared to the wonderful perspective of the female miners.

[LudwigNagasena]

Ok, so you think that black and white people are different for some social reasons. What if they are different in such way that black people are less likely to want to be programmers? What is even the issue here? Isn’t this also diversity? After all, not all white people are programmers and there is no reason to expect that the rate of software engineers among white people is “optimal” in the social sense.

[vmception]

recruit at universities where they attend.

reach out to people with the skillset you like.

black engineers have jobs. the government and defense contractors recruit at schools that have a higher percentage of black software engineers. its not that hard of a concept.

[samatman]

There's no amount of shuffling the deck chairs that gets out of the stark fact that black developers are a lower percentage of the developer population than black people are of the American population. I'd be surprised if the former broke 5%, but let's say 5% for the sake of argument.

I know a few black developers. They have no problem staying employed. Big surprise! They're developers, we're blessed to have a chronic shortage of labor. There isn't an untapped labor pool of chronically underemployed black developers, because they aren't incompetent at greater rates than their non-white peers.

So with extraordinary effort, a company can get up to the ~13% ratio which would represent parity. Or a black startup founder from an HBCU could draw on her peers and get a much higher percentage.

But, relentlessly, that means other companies will have even fewer than 5%. If having 13% of American-born developers be black is a worthwhile goal (and I don't see why not), hiring harder can't reach it. It just can't.

[tfehring]

Just to put some actual numbers behind this: it looks like 3% of AP Computer Science exam takers are black [0], and 6% of computer science and engineering graduates are black [1]. But only 1% of "technical workers" at Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter are black, and only 26% of black CS grads (vs. 40% of white CS grads) go into CS jobs - looks like most of the 14% go into operations and administrative roles [1].

So clearly and unsurprisingly there is a problem at the top of the funnel (3% << 13%), but it sure seems like there's a problem lower in the funnel too. I assume those folks aren't turning down SWE job offers to take administrative jobs. To your point, obviously every engineering team can't be 13% black if only 6% [2] of people qualified to write code are black, but if big organizations are way below 6% black it seems fair to ask why.

[0] https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/no-girls-blacks-or-...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/upshot/dont-blame-recruit...

[2] Using the share of black CS grads as a somewhat bogus approximation, this is probably an underestimate since black developers are disproportionately likely to come from non-traditional backgrounds, as the article points out

[ZephyrBlu]

> I assume those folks aren't turning down SWE job offers to take administrative jobs

This is a reasonable assumption, though I'm interested what they classify as Office and Administration.

There could also be some confounding variables here. For example, perhaps black people are less likely to move across the country for jobs because they prefer to stay close to family (I.e. cultural differences).

Of course, the easy way out is to say that the system is biased against black people. Which might well be true, but we don't know that.

I think Asians are a very interesting example of the effect of culture. There is definitely strong cultural pressure for them to go into specific fields and be high achievers, so it's no surprise to me that they are massively overrepresented in the Computer and Tech field.

This is all to say: I agree it doesn't look great, but there could easily be hidden reasons for the large drop off in the funnel.

[mscuwa]

So what you are suggesting is to go beyond normal company business to recruit black developers? I.e. to give black developers an advantage over all others. That's a textbook definition of a racism, don't you think?

[vmception]

normal company business involves recruiting at universities. that person's company business does not seemingly recruit at all "nObOdy ApplIeD?!?!", many companies like theirs do recruit and chose to recruit at certain universities and act just as confused as that person's company, when there are simply more universities that can be recruited from and many of those have a higher percentage of engineers that are black.

you are desperately looking for something that wasn't suggested or said, but if you weren't (despite asking a question and responding with a conclusion you already had) the answer to your first question is "no". it would not be racist to expand recruiting to more engineering schools. and outside of that many existing recruiters have no difficulty reaching out to engineers with skills they like, this person's company does not seem to do that.

[AdrianB1]

If you recruit from best universities and you decide to recruit from some universities because they have more people of a specific race, that is a racial based decision and it makes it racist. Including based on race is as racist as excluding based on race.

[vmception]

if you acknowledge that the “best universities” dont create better or more productive programmers for what companies in the sector actually do, and those universities’ demographics are perpetuated by socioeconomic disasters then you are simply expanding your recruiting efforts

also this person’s company doesnt do any recruiting so that not a strong argument for them

[AdrianB1]

I fully agree that the best universities don't have the exclusivity on the best output, but the classification of what is considered "best" should be based on the average quality of the output.

Also recruiting in universities is an effort that does not scale, I did that for about 5 years and it was not possible to reach all the universities in my country, so I had to limit myself to the universities in the top 3-4 cities that I could reach. Yes, I left out some that may have some good candidates, but this is a limitation of resources and not an intentional exclusion "I don't go to X because I don't like them". In the old days companies were not putting announcements to hire in every newspaper in every small city across the country, but only in key places to maximize output per cost.

[mscuwa]

Expanding recruitment won't be racist by itself, no. But going beyond what company is doing now to hire more _black_ devs would be (they didn't ask where to recruit people, so they probably have enough candidates, the question was "where to recruit black devs if we don't have any black candidates").

[vmception]

its not prejudiced

its not harming other groups

expanding recruitment efforts to places that include more black developers is not racist by any definition. maybe you aren't reading this the same way, its places that also include more black developers

it is not racist by any definition of the word. just because they change a practice does not make it racist, even if their reasoning was as contrived as you think it is, it still would not be racist/prejudiced/exclusionary-to-other-groups when the result is simply expanding efforts to places that also include more black developers

[LudwigNagasena]

Well, if going out of your way to hire people of certain race isn’t racist, this word has clearly lost all its meaning.