It's crazy too because diverse companies tend to outperform non-diverse ones, it's just the opportunities to get there that are few and far between for under-represented groups, because of the structural and social barriers.
Many don't realize or acknowledge the existence of these barriers, because they are not affected by them. When you have the wind at your back you tend to attribute your success to yourself.
Big US companies also have a management problem. Boeing is the poster child. From being storied company that helped win WWII with its B-17s. It decided to claim positioning bigger engines on the 737Max would not change flight characteristics and not tell the pilots who fly the planes and are responsible for passengers lives about MCAS. It then outsourced the code for MCAS to programmers who made $9/hour. Boeing is telling us loud and clear that it doesn't care about physics or its customers. It also doesn't care about its workers.
Looks like this was submitted ~5 times to HN in the past 5 days.
This is the first time it's gotten any comments.
I'll guess the non-interest is due to some combination of HNer's being unaware, uninterested, and resigned. And a lot of folks just not wanting to go near a topic that often gets loud & divisive, but seldom seems to inspire any insight or progress.
> I'll guess the non-interest is due to some combination of HNer's being unaware, uninterested, and resigned.
I think most people here would accept that black people in America are systematically disenfranchised. But the entire onus of the article is on the failure stemming from within academia. This isn't an academic discussion board, and I never attended a computer science program so I can't speak to that either.
And again, the data they presented showed how overrepresented other minorities are within the programming profession. So it doesn't seem fair call the entire profession racist when it seems like the specific problem is that black Americans are disenfranchised across all spectrums of their life.
This isn't a "computer science" problem (or even a racism problem), it's an HR and management issue, it's a schools issue, it's a socioeconomic conditions past and present issue. None of those are as simple and easy as blaming winners for losers, though.
Many don't realize or acknowledge the existence of these barriers, because they are not affected by them. When you have the wind at your back you tend to attribute your success to yourself.