I’m not American so I may have a hard time following but can someone please explain why counting people by race isn’t deeply racist? Also this echos the numerus clausus system that deeply hurt Jews in the name of ‘overrepresentation’, why does anyone think this is any different?

The information is voluntary. Individuals can submit a census with their race/ethnicity as "Prefer not to specify"

The data can be used to help find if people are getting proper representation, etc. Racism is rooted in superiority. This is more like, race-consciousness, which is rooted in humane treatment and empathy

What is weird to me that this is a racist approach to society, racist as in believes that race is the way society is structured as opposed to for example a marxist class system and racist in its belief that fixing this should be done on a race by race basis

I guess for me these statistics would be easier to digest if they were centered around poverity: e.g. How many cars did your family own, size of childhood home or something of that sort

Like you rightly said, you are not American. So it's really different for you to conceptualize or understand how deeply and integral racism is woven into every element of US. Reports like that helps make it visible to us so we can at least try to address it if we choose to. What you're doing is akin to blaming a mirror for putting a scar on your face. No the mirror isn’t the scar or the cause of the scar.

It seems that you consider employers keeping track of employee race, ethnicity, and gender data discriminatory.

Employers are required to provide this data to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: the federal agency charged with enforcing federal law which makes workspace discrimination illegal.

This agency came to exist through the legendary Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was supported by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, along with Presidents JFK and LBJ.

You'd be forgiven for not understanding American politics.

But any American would be foolish to consider that race and ethnicity do not play a role in how our society is structured after over 200 years of slavery and nearly 100 years of Jim Crow.

Racism has been a poison built into the structure of our country's institutions, and being race conscious is a part of the cure.

> It seems that you consider employers keeping track of employee race, ethnicity, and gender data discriminatory.

That's not what I understood from their comment.

I think a lot of controversy on the topic stems from people defining racism differently. From how I remember - racism was initially about categorically treating people differently depending on their race. That still exists in some areas/workplaces etc but has been mostly solved from a societal viewpoint.

What were now arguing about as racism is no longer the categorical mistreatment/favoritism and instead what people end up with, while ignoring the way how we got there - and that issue is indeed incredibly hard to solve.

Fwiw, I agree with the initial statement by them: statistics around race are always inherently racism and don't really show issues unless you drill down into the localities (checking racial representation in localities, as there is where the initial racism continues to exist).

The other issues have to be solved differently, as they're not about race and more about how that person got into that position (which might be caused from the initial racism, but that's unlikely to be the reason limiting them today)

> I think a lot of controversy on the topic stems from people defining racism differently. From how I remember - racism was initially about categorically treating people differently depending on their race. That still exists in some areas/workplaces etc but has been mostly solved from a societal viewpoint.

This is the John Roberts "our country has changed" perspective. There is definitely not consensus across US society for it. It is a view strongly held by some and strongly rejected by others, correlating largely with political affiliation.

There's not even consensus that discrimination is bad. About all you can say is that spouting explicitly racist views is no longer accepted in polite society.

> What were now arguing about as racism is no longer the categorical mistreatment/favoritism and instead what people end up with, while ignoring the way how we got there - and that issue is indeed incredibly hard to solve.

The struggle today is the same struggle it's always been. The same factions who opposed having laws punishing discrimination passed decades ago are arguing for the dismantlement of those laws today. Those factions didn't accept that the discrimination those laws outlawed was problematic before, and they still don't today.

Counting people by race has its benefits and it’s drawbacks. While the point you bring up is valid and of concern, on the other side, if you don’t measure things on the basis of race you don’t have any idea how much of and effect racism may play a role in the thing you are measuring.

If we didn’t already have the concept of race I certainly wouldn’t want to conjure it up out of thin air, but in a country where we openly and explicitly discriminated against people on the basis of their race within the lifetime of my still living parents, it’s not something you can simply ignore the effect of and just hope they go away.

I found it extremely annoying when I went to the doctor in the UK and they asked what my race was. First because my racial background is nobody’s business and it’s an information that historically has only be used against me. Second because, if it is a scientific and relevant fact, a doctor should be able determine it without my uneducated opinion.

After more than 10 years, I came to accept it as an almost innocuous quirk of the English-speaking mind, something akin to the Italians complaining about pineapple pizza.

I'm not American either, but after having lived here for a couple years, I can say that across the board, Americans are _obsessed_ with race. Folks on both the right and left continuously come up with new and interesting ways to pit people against each other for the colour of their skin, it's almost surreal how pervasive it's become.

Pretending to be race blind just means giving racists free rein. "I don't see race therefore no racism could have occurred."

I came to this post looking for salary data, and imagine my shock to see that according to the first link, as of 2018 only 40% of the industry consisted of white males. Yet here we are in 2022 and the fervor to discriminate against straight white males has only intensified. Unbelievable. It's no wonder white men are increasingly dropping out of a society which has become hostile to them while ostensibly in pursuit of "equity".

ESG initiatives are a crime. Figuratively and literally. Absurd that people are so willing to go along with this crap - but not entirely difficult to believe when pushback carries the risk of termination.

Isn’t 40% still an overrepresentation? I’m actually with you that ESG hiring isn’t all that useful but you’re acting like 40% isn’t more than healthy domination of one of the most powerful business sectors in the world.

Is 40% a problem that needs correcting with overt, forced discrimination? Especially when the actual issue, that of the pipeline, is totally ignored when these hiring policies are dictated by activists and the investor class?

And of course no one is complaining about the far greater overrepresentation of Asians. Unless it's politically expedient to claim that they're "white adjacent".

There's no justification for any of this. Its pure, petty racism. We have regressed as a society.

100% wouldn't be an overrepresentation if that is the percent that is most qualified for the positions. The NBA isn't diversity hiring for their players. There's an obvious reason for that. The consequences of diversity hiring are going to catch up to us eventually, assuming they haven't already.

>The consequences of diversity hiring are going to catch up to us eventually, assuming they haven't already.

Especially when one takes two seconds to actually consider the implications of these policies: if you are going to far as to acknowledge that discrimination is ok because different demographics bring different professional attributes to the table, then you are implicitly acknowledging discrimination is OK because some of these attributes are worth more than others. You can't claim that diversity of skin color == diversity of thought and pretend that the differences are only positive - that's not logically consistent.

Race blindness is the optimal solution so long as humans are products of genes and culture. We were on a decent path for a few decades - now all these policies are doing is justifying a resurgence of classical racism; except the racists think they have the moral imperative because they've convinced themselves that all of their ills, past and present, are entirely the fault of evil white men (and women when convenient). This is a disgusting, dangerous game, doubly so when you're not allowed to question it.

> There's an obvious reason for that.

What's the reason?

Black people on average are better than basketball. Probably a combination of genes and a culture where they're more likely to practice.

You know, the same way that white guys are, on average, more likely to pick up and practice programming out of interest than, say, females of any race.

Thanks for making this! One thing that would be great is an option to just show the race comparison or the gender comparison. If I’m comparing Alphabet with the tech sector in general, it currently shows that Alphabet is 37% white male while the sector in general is 39%. It’s hard to tell whether this is because Alphabet is less white than average, less male than average, or both.

Thanks for taking the time to try it out and comment!

We definitely want to make it as easy as possible to do those comparisons and understand the data. For example, adding an additional selector to further tune the comparison as you are suggesting is definitely on the list.

I would love to see veteran status on here. If you could delineate between officer and enlisted as well as campaign badge status, that'd be very revealing. I've had a tough time getting any of these stats out of my employers and we're frequently left off of DEI boards.

What would that tell you about a company, though?

Is this a hostile environment for former military personnel? If you were former military personnel that might be of interest. If you're of that segment of the left that hates the military you might be looking for companies with unusually low levels for its industry of former military personnel as a sign the company would be congenial.

The problem is that only a small percentage of Americans are veterans in the first place, and an even smaller percentage are going to be qualified for certain industries. So if you're looking at, say, a 300-person software company, it's very possible they support veterans, want to hire veterans, and have 0 veterans on staff.

(There's also a huge difference between opposing military conflicts and supporting veterans, which is evident in the equal support for the VA among Democratic and Republican voters[1]).

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/05/the-changin...

> So if you're looking at, say, a 300-person software company, it's very possible they support veterans, want to hire veterans, and have 0 veterans on staff.

We're a little less than 10% of the population, that aligns with other protected classes. If you have no veterans that signals you have some issues. Having few is to be expected, but still not "good" imo.

> There's also a huge difference between opposing military conflicts and supporting veterans, which is evident in the equal support for the VA among Democratic and Republican voters

There is, but pay attention to how those folks speak. A lot of their attitudes about the MIC will usually leak to veterans, veteran issues, and policies that would affect us. It's treading a very close line. One good start would be to include that in unconscious bias training, but you actually need veterans at a company in the first place to necessitate that.

Currently the only protected classes people demand to see at a company are women (far larger share of Americans than veterans) and Black people (about 2x the number of veterans).

Veterans are also people who are more likely to end up in certain industries, unlike (say) a Black person. You'd expect a lot of veterans in military, law enforcement, and government.

How many does that leave for the rest of us to hire? And how many are getting the degrees necessary for certain fields, like nursing or civil engineering?

I don't agree that 0 veterans (up to a point) says something about a company until you can show that they had a pool of qualified applicants and chose not to hire any. I would say the same about racial bias, too, by the way. A company with no Black people isn't confirmed racist until you know their applicant demographics.

I said that "you have some issues"; that's not quite the same as levying a discriminatory label. In fact, I'd be cautious in asserting things like that. Rather, its a signal that a company has room to grow and change if it prioritizes such things.

I'm mainly interested in meeting people who I share a background with, especially campaign vets. Everything changed when I got out and my life, although somewhat metaphorically in the same place as my peers, is vastly different. It's nice to talk about stress, learning, pay/finances, dealing with hierarchy, vet issues, etc with someone who can contribute a bit more than nods and sympathy.

The military keeps a lot of stats about post-service folks that they show you before you get out. One is that most veterans end up in blue collar fields, which is curious by itself given how technical many jobs are (the direct skills don't translate but the mindset does). The second is the graduation rate, which is generally why I encourage companies to hire SWEs without degrees (this also has overlap with other DEI goals). I don't worry about libertarians or the far left too much. Usually those folks warm up after a while once they realize you're not Baba Yaga.

There should really be a stat for US based employees & outsourced contract workers. Accenture has lots of overseas contract workers that they pay significantly less

By overseas contract worker do you mean immigrant in the us or someone employed in a country other than the us?

You should be another column that shows the stacked column for entire adult population (or possibly "population that is employed or seeking employment")

Or population of computer science / math graduates.

Thanks for checking it out and taking the time to comment!

We are considering expanding the reference column to have more options, including population and CBSA (core-based statistical area). The idea of limiting it to "population employed/seeking employment" is certainly a way to mitigate some of the challenges of providing a general population comparison.

-- With full discretion

So I see that McDonalds is far more diversed than Netflix...

However, an average salary in Netflix is 5-6 times more than the one in McDonalds.

Meanning, one can support more people with their salary in Netflix (or Alphabet, Meta, Apple, et al).

The impact on an entire family when a single member "makes it" to the outer circles.

This is something I have learned on myself when I "made it" to the tech industry, ~25 years ago.

https://employees.fyi/?year=2018&job=PROFESSIONALS&reference...

This is really interesting!

I'd love to be able to reference against US (and maybe world) population numbers, too, to see how a company's employee base compares to the population they hire from and (sometimes) the population they are trying to serve.

Thanks for the feedback and for checking out the site!

We are considering expanding the reference column to have more options, including population and CBSA (core-based statistical area). This would also align with some of the aggregate data available from the EEOC. For example, companies could be compared against the "New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA Metropolitan Statistical Area".

More info:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core-based_statistical_area

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_core-based_statistical...

Nice, simple feedback:

I'd like to see more companies at once, ideally 5+ columns

Simple yet valuable. We will look at doing so on wider viewports!

and how does this benefit workers?

It doesn’t.

ok then, next

I love the percentile median income data from bls.gov

That'd be more useful to me.

Alternatively, given how aggressively all companies are recruiting Black candidates, they're poached from less desirable employers to more desirable employers.

An average white, male employee might accept that their mid-level, unfulfilling but acceptable cubicle at eBay is as good as they're going to get and stay for years. An otherwise identical minority candidate will be getting 10 recruiter messages a day for better opportunities.

Yeah, you're right. Being black is a huge advantage in life.

There's no need for this sort of snarky trolling.

Systemic discrimination against Black Americans both historically and today is well documented and understood. I could have written a long preamble about the many elements of society that factor into racial disparities, but I assumed I could skip that for brevity since everyone on HN is already well aware.

You need to look at this data with an intersectional perspective. An overly generalized label of just "Black" as an identifier does little to help and may actively mislead in certain situations. Considering multiple attributes- race, educational attainment, location, industry, job function, seniority, etc is critical because the intersection of these may cause dramatically different experiences.

Consider this example to maybe make it clear. Imagine a gay man pursuing a career as a Broadway dancer versus a gay man pursuing a career as an elementary school teacher in Alabama. Will being gay have the same risks and challenges for each man? Is it fair or useful to try to group their experiences into one "score" for if that attribute is an advantage or disadvantage?

Slight note: that's 0.63% Black male for eBay professionals. Across the entire company in all roles, eBay clocks in at 1.4%.

Compare against Coca Cola's professionals:

> 5.82% - Black or African American Male

> 13.66% - Black or African American Female

> This industry is absolutely brutal if you are not white or asian, and that's seemingly just how it's gonna be.

I didn't start out in tech, and I feel like I was dropped on Mars. The demographics are so wildly skewed, and there are so many people who believe that the skew is right and just. I hate it.

To what extent do black computer science grads have worse job placement than white/asian ones? At my employer for every position we're required to interview at least one underrepresented demographic (basically female, black or latino), but recruiters are struggling to find candidates. It gives me the impression that there simply aren't many computer science grads in those demographics

As a white woman in the tech industry, the entire pipeline is leaky. You're discouraged from studying engineering before you go into college. You're discouraged once you're in college. You get less money and fewer advancements once you're in industry. Dudes creep on you and condescend to you, assuming you're a diversity hire. Even encouraging people will push you into non-technical roles because you have "soft skills". Eventually you get sick of all the bullshit and you take one of those non-technical roles, or you just leave the industry altogether.

Even if you feed more people into one end of the woodchipper, very few will make it out the other end intact.

Contrast that experience with that of female MDs, where even though there's surely still plenty of bullshit you get to treat a lot of grateful female patients — pretty rewarding in comparison! (And grateful male patients too, but the point is that it's not just male patients.) And now women outnumber men for both applying to med school and graduating.

The same nonsense about aptitudes, interests, whatever was thrown at women about careers in medicine. Eventually, the tech industry will even out too, because today's tech demographics are not the result of some unchangeable destiny. I just wish it would happen in my lifetime.

I would expect a general correction to women being over represented in universities and correction for privilege programs like women-in-STEM before I expect it to “even out” with women dominating every field.

For sure. U.S. Comp Sci grads are around 1/5 female right now. And you need look no further than the hostility of the tech industry for why they might want to go elsewhere. (Cue the usual "women aren't interested in computer science", which is exactly what I'm talking about.)

Do you see it being equally problematic that U.S. Nursing grads are about 1/5 male right now? If not, why is it that this should matter in one industry and not the other?

It is a problem that men in nursing are often discriminated against, both by hiring boards, their coworkers, and their patients. We’d probably have better health outcomes with a more varied population of nurses.

Here on HN we talk about CS more… because we’re on a CS discussing site, and CS generally pays better than nursing, and women have historically faced more discrimination across society.

But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also care about male underrepresentation in nursing, it’s just less relevant here.

What hostility? We receive 1 woman candidate application per 20 male on average.

Will you be answering my question above? I can only assume you've seen it by now.

What's the point? It's a superficial premise and presumes that I'm a rank hypocrite; it looks to me as though you have nothing but contempt for what I might say in response. It's not we're going to have a good faith discussion, this is just gotcha games and ideological battle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

This isn't a formal debate. Nobody owes anybody else a response, and choosing not to reply to baiting posts, opting out of poisonous back-and-forth, is not only not ceding the argument, it's upholding the spirit of the HN guidelines.

If you actually want to engage, try to show that you're actually listening to the person you're engaging with and not throwing rocks at some straw man caricature of them. A good exercise would be to couch your post in terms that your interlocutor might agree with.

> It gives me the impression that there simply aren't many computer science grads in those demographics

Others have addressed other aspects of the disparity, but I'll chime in here and respond to this common misdirection with the reminder that everyone that everyone who works at a tech company does not have or need a computer science degree.

The thing about a tech company is that it's still a company with many of the same corporate functions as a railroad or oil company: finance/accounting, sales, marketing, human resources, facilities management, legal, etc. While it's fine for your head of HR to have a CS degree, it's definitely not the main criteria for the job. I don't have current numbers for FAANG, but would be somewhat surprised if more than ~40% of the headcount of any big tech company comprises roles that require or use a CS degree.

Incidentally: there was a robust discussion on this site today about the merits of whether a degree was even necessary, and HN commenters posted to indicate that not having a degree has not been an impediment to them working in the industry. I think having a CS degree is perhaps not the gating factor here. (Yes, I have a CS degree.)

Google has sushi chefs on staff, and yet it's still a misconception (misdirection?) that aggregate corporate numbers are skewed because of a dearth of Hispanic/Black/women CS grads. Whether that is actually the case or not, we can say for certain that tech does a terrible job at hitting their diversity in non-engineering roles, areas where Coke/AT&T/Accenture are not having a similar problem.

It isn't just tech, for what it's worth. Before moving to straight up software dev, I was in finance and worked at a small company that had no women at all. Before that, I was an Army officer in the Armor branch when women were still legally barred from serving in combat roles, so no women in any of my units. I've only ever had a max of two women on a team since going into software, usually one, and that number has been zero for the past two years, but it's still more than "legally can't even apply for the job."

I guess I do wonder what, if anything, it has done to my view of the world to have virtually no professional interactions with women for nearly 20 years. The other thing is even when I've had a woman or two women on my team, all but one time it has been in a management role. I've only had one woman teammate ever in a technical role.

Actually, the BLS has detailed tables on this by occupation. Scroll down to construction jobs and women are virtually non-existent: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm. Most of them are not even annotated, with cement masons being 0%. My dad was a plumber, so apparently neither of us ever worked with women.

I don't believe it's right or just, but I do believe it is what it is...Blame it on culture, biology, interest, or whatever. However, I doubt there is foul play here. As far as I can tell, the demographics are skewed here, the same way the NBA is. I wish there were more Black programmers, like I wish there were more Asian NBA players.

I blame it on people blaming it on culture, biology, interest — which says "you aren't here because you don't belong here". And then people nope the hell out out of tech and go into other industries.

Can you clarify what actions that you would like employers to take? AFAICT, employers are trying to out reach to marginalized communities and meet them where they are. How are companies supposed to hire without compromising quality? Are you suggesting a quota based system similar to the green card system?

To tie things back to the article... how about looking at what Coca Cola did right?

I suspect one thing they did was avoid making the assumption that hiring candidates from marginalized communities compromises quality.

I mean, they're based in Atlanta which is about 50% black.

First, "generic corporate employees" seems like a pretty disrespectful way to describe the Coca-Cola employees classified as "professionals".

Second, it's not like non-FAANG tech companies, despite lower standards for engineering positions, have higher numbers in the Black, Hispanic, or female demographics.

Third, if you look at the data for Coca Cola's "Exec/Sr Officials & Managers" where the "standards" without question are comparable to those at tech companies, the percentages aren't as high but they're still way better than you see in tech leadership:

> 3.37% - Black or African American Male

> 4.31% - Black or African American Female

Not comparable to engineering at faang. Coca Cola sells itself. Still Coca Cola is way racist. America is 13% black.

> Coca Cola sells itself

This is an interesting way to contrast Coca-Cola with FAANG, of which the majority are routinely under antitrust scrutiny. Put another way: does Coca-Cola (market share: 43%) sell itself any more than Google (market share: 92%)?

what does that have to do with the intellectual ability requited to get a google engineering jobs vs a marketing gig at coca cola?

You were implying that Coca-Cola sells itself and therefore doesn't require singularly talented employees. It's a reasonable question to ask why a monopoly needs to hire unicorns to keep its business functioning.

(Aside from which: most tech companies are probably on the order of 60% non-engineers. The "engineer" part is a common bit of misdirection to elide the presence of the majority of FAANG employees, who are not engineers. People who can successfully sell plain water can probably sell other things too.)

Source for these industries with a bunch of black former programmers?

Pretty sure if you mandate these policies, it would violate the Equal Employment Opportunity act

nothing brutal about it. whats the percentage of asian females working as auto mechanics in the usa? if low, why is that?

> However, being a computer programmer is one of the best jobs on earth.

To you, maybe. I’m going to surprise you, but just because you find X one of the best things in life and Y is worse than X to you – it doesn’t mean that X is universally better than Y for everyone.

> We are paid like lawyers and coddled like children to write text files in our underwear.

Because that’s what software engineering is. Uhuh.

> Everyone across the socioeconomic spectrum wants what we have.

And you found that where? On ad websites for every generic bootcamp?

One would also have to know how many people of each background applied for jobs at ebay.

This goes even more for remote dev roles. A job post will get a ton of Indian applicants.