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