[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.