My BS in CS is from NC A&T.<p>My MS in CS in from UNC-CH.<p>Anybody who thinks the hackers from Duke/UNC consistently outshine the hackers from NC A&T is a damn fool.<p>I was regularly <i>FLOORED</i> by the skills and raw programming chops from peers at NC A&T. Some of the smartest young men and women in the CS field.<p>I worked in a small research group at NC A&T. Maybe 10 undergrads. Last time I checked, there were something like 6 MS in CS folks from that group and a couple of PhDs.<p>When I was an undergrad at NC A&T, we had a weekly colloquium for all CS students. We <i>regularly</i> had alumni from NC A&T and other HBCUs on stage who talked openly about navigating the hiring world, which companies you could expect racism in, and what the working world of programming was like for "people who look like us."<p>If some shitty recruiter event occurred, <i>we all knew about it.</i><p>Want to score some of the best engineers from HBCUs? It's easy. Hire the best ones you can convince to take your mega-FAANG package from. Then send them back every freaking year with a corporate card and tell them to impress people.<p>I hate these "stupid recruiter" stories. Somebody should get their ass fired.
In case people didn't read this story carefully before commenting (we all do that sometimes), it's worth calling the nut graf of this story out:<p>The firm this engineer is talking about did a recruiting trip to Duke (and UNC), like every big tech firm does. An hour away from Duke is the country's largest HBCU, NC A&T, which is included on the trip, ostensibly for inclusivity's sake.<p>The firm serves a catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session, which is held after class hours to ensure attendance. The next day, highly-ranked prospects from Duke/UNC are invited to a private dinner at a fine dining restaurant.<p>That same day, the firm holds an abbreviated meeting during class hours at A&T, where they serve (wait for it) the leftovers from the catered dinner at the Duke/UNC session.
There is both a pipeline problem and a bias problem and they are intertwined.<p>Historical discrimination has left black families much poorer than they would otherwise be. Poverty discriminates in myriad ways: lack of good role models and mentors, poor educational environments, lack of nutrition, lack of opportunities for enrichment, etc...<p>Discrimination is also still present and different ethnic groups are affected differently.<p>The negative effects of poverty and discrimination compound over time such that when you get to a tech company's hiring process, the pipeline would have shrunk massively. The students in this pipeline are competing against upper middle class kids who have been groomed their entire lives to compete in the system designed by people like them.<p>As to the recruiting pipeline, there is class elitism/narrow mindedness in tech companies that does narrow recruiting. Some interviewers don't countenance views or attitudes other than their own just as some recruiters favor certain universities far more than others. This seems to be changing at least at the recruiting level.<p>As to why some ethnicities still succeed or fail despite discrimination, that is at least partly cultural and partly selection bias and these in turn have also been affected by discrimination past and present.<p>Lastly, I suspect the beef some poorer whites have is that they too have been discriminated against due to poverty and they feel that another group now has a leg up on them and that discrimination against them isn't acknowledged.<p>I hope that we come up with a just system for everyone.
There was an article I came across where a black startup founder was frequently mistaken as a regular employee while his white co-worker was mistaken as the CEO. On multiple occasions the unaware person shook the hand of the white co-worker, ignored the true startup founder, and so on.<p>"Adding to the insult, [Will] Hayes finds himself at a distinct disadvantage in meetings that open with a case of mistaken identity. Venture capital is based on relationships, and investors aren’t typically primed to write a check when they feel unsettled. “You see it in the body language, you see it in the lack of questions and engagement,” says Hayes, 39. “They can’t wait for this meeting to get over.”<p>For nearly four years, Hayes would attend investor meetings alongside [longtime colleague] Messick, the former chief marketing officer at Lucidworks. VCs are trained to look for patterns in startup founders, Messick says, and there aren’t many Black Mark Zuckerbergs. 'Years and years of a Black guy and a White guy walking in the room, and the White guy is the CEO,' Messick says. 'Whether malicious, whether negligent, it was always awful.'"<p>Here's the post: <a href="https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/16/for-black-ceos-in-silicon-valley-humiliation-is-a-part-of-doing-business/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/16/for-black-ceos-in-sil...</a>
Wow. This confirms something I saw SO often as an undergrad.<p>I went to a predominantly black city college right next door to Georgia Tech, so we got plenty of big companies knocking on our door.<p>Only they never took us seriously, gave rushed presentations, and never collected resumes. Tech? They got parties, dinners, entire clubs rented out. It was posh, and if you were like me - you figured out ways to get into these exclusive events, evade bouncers and find an engineer just to talk to them.<p>There are a few people in this comment section talking about how 'minorities and women simply skew differently'. Maybe try walking a mile in our shoes
I grew up in Greensboro where A&T is located. Many of my high school classmates went to college there. One friend even led the top CS student org on campus.<p>I pushed so hard for my employer, Sexy Unicorn Startup which said all the important things you expect a woke company to say, to recruit there. I told them I would set everything up and that all I needed was a budget. I got nothing but lip service.<p>So, HN, you want to do it the right way? I can be on A&T's campus in 15 minutes. I will connect you with the student orgs and help you do it the right way. You won't regret it. Email is in profile.
I've gone on numerous recruiting trips and this story paints a very one sided narrative and it doesn't quite line with my own experiences.<p>First off, big feeder schools, the Dukes and UNCs of the world, they have extremely sophisticated internal career programs that throw out the red carpet for us when we arrive. Yes we order the food (and its usually pizza), but they literally do all the pre-work and advertise for us, give us the floor and make sure we have the best chances to meet their students. They schedule the program and the times for us, so we just roll in, present, and then have lots of meet and greet with the students.<p>Second, recruiters only have so much time and energy to meet with students, so they have to go to places with the least friction. The recruiters live by the rule, meet that quota or you're out! So that translates to, schools better have students who can pass the interview process, or they are out.<p>My company has a huge list of diversity schools that we actively recruit from. This goes against the rules above and requires special recruiters who aren't being tracked against the same quota system. Why? Although these diversity schools produce highly qualified candidates, their career programs aren't sophisticated enough, nor is the coursework aligned with the goal of getting these students into silicon valley tech jobs.<p>Remember, at a very real level, you're competing for the same jobs at the same level as someone graduating from CMU or MIT. If your CS department isn't preparing you for what's ahead, you have to make that knowledge-gap up on your own.
"Did Hooli recruiters think that they wouldn’t pass the hiring bar?"<p>Most likely, yes. In the US news rankings, Duke is #10 and UNC is #20. NC A&T is #281.<p>NC A&T has a 46% graduation rate vs Duke's 95%.<p>Duke engineering is ranked #20, NC A&T is #134.<p>These schools just aren't in the same league.
> I’m sure that the NC A&T event was just so Hooli could check some “diversity recruitment” box.<p>Amusingly, that's exactly what the "interactive" ADA process is at my workplace - just a check box. I submitted a request with medical diagnosis and links to several third party expert recommended accommodations for it, an HR rep booked a meeting with me, told me in the first sentence that I'm requesting an accommodation I didn't request, and that she's denying it, then the meeting ends, and she writes up an email lying saying I requested something I did't and that they rejected it. All appeals are just met with the claim that I didn't state what accommodation I want clearly, even though I sent links ahead of time to reputable sites listing them.<p>Never realized that's what it must feel like as a minority to get brushed off and ignored due to who you are.
Two things stick out for me:<p>- leftover food. Really? This is really shitty behaviour; I am all for reuse, recycle; but this is neither the time nor the moment<p>Independent of that:
- I do not know much about US-Universities, so I checked. Duke is US Top 10, and A&T is not in the Times ranking since it is >600. So to me calling A&T "and a damn good one." is just delusional. Maybe it is a 'not so bad one', but I think things (quality of the University) can only improve if one is willing to see the truth.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
I'm surprised nobody's commented with the first thing that occurred to me: UNC, Duke, and NC A&T. One of these is not like the others. It's NC A&T. Why? It's not race. It's the fact that UNC and Duke are much, much better schools. The top North Carolina Black developer talent is...already at Duke, of course.<p>Cisco or whoever may have been stopping by NC A&T to tick a box and therefore treated it perfunctorily. The author might also be exaggerating, it's certainly in his/her best interests. We all might do well to avoid drawing any conclusions from anecdote.
While school specific recruiting trips maybe drive results for recruiting teams, there is no way to get away from inherit bias. By only recruiting at "top schools" you skip talent that couldn't afford tuition at an elite school and chose scholarships over paying 60k a year. You optimize for who could do well on the SAT in high school, which is inherently a product of privilege and who could pay to study for the test and even knew it was a road block (I didn't realize the SAT was important until friends that went to "good schools told me to study for it. In school I was always told you couldn't study for it). Systemic doesn't necessarily mean any particular individual is biased. The entire way we conduct business is.
I was 100% on board with the "it's just a pipeline problem" idea until I started interviewing. The more I interviewed, the more I saw how sourcing/recruiting works, the more hiring decisions I witnessed being made, the clearer it became that tech hiring is incredibly subjective. That subjectivity gives room for all kinds of bias to creep in at all the different points of the process.<p>People get upset about the idea of unconscious bias (I suspect they resent the implication that they're secretely racist or sexist) but it's very real. It doesn't have to involve the person's identity. Bias creeps into your decision-making when you're having a bad day, or when the candidate reminds you of a person you don't get along with, or when they just rub you the wrong way for some reason. It's very easy to dress it up as objectivity. You're just grilling them on the technical details, holding them to the company's high standards, being a bar-raiser, something like that. The reverse is also true - you cut people slack because you like them without even realizing what you're doing.<p>Recruiters devote the most time to candidates they think have the best chance of getting through the interview process. The interview process tends to be bullshit and easily gamed. Industry candidates who have proven an ability to make it through a similar hiring process will be given preference over those who haven't. Student candidates at schools who know the score will be given preference over those at schools that don't play ball.<p>Referalls cause a slew of problems. The way hiring decisions are made cause a slew of problems.<p>This may come off as bitter. I am bitter - not about being rejected, but rather about the people I've had a role in rejecting over the years. Industry candidates who were obviously good at their jobs but terrible at the interview dance. Student candidates who were obviously smart and ambitious but only became aware of the types of questions they would be asked a week or two before the interview. Working with and reporting to cruel and selfish people who excelled at an interview process that's so convinced it's objective and meritocratic that evaluating soft skills isn't even considered.<p>It's so widely understood and accepted that software hiring processes are bullshit, but for some reason the minute people start talking about the impact of that bullshit on diversity... "it's a pipeline problem."
It is appalling how poorly NC A&T was treated here and I think we all need to be having this conversation, but at the same time you can't just ignore the fact that Duke and UNC are just in a totally different league in terms of university rankings, so it's not surprising that they're getting the red carpet treatment.<p>For the record I think university rankings are stupid, and the college application process is certainly no meritocracy (an unremarkable high school classmate of mine got into Duke with a 3.4 GPA despite being rejected at our state's lower ranked state schools - she came from a family of Duke alumni). But it doesn't surprise me that companies engage in this university elitism, as sad as it might be.
It is entirely possible for there to be a pipeline problem, and also for behavior like the one described in the post to bias recruiting. Two things can be true.
US College Rankings 2020<p>Duke University: 10th<p>North Carolina A&T: >600th<p>While the author tries to frame the university as "a damn good one", in reality it probably isn't.
People are too comfortable. Your life exists in a tech bubble where your biggest annoyances are the most trivial things (my Tesla panels don't line up, ios does this annoying thing, someone said something rude on twitter)<p>Techies are so coddled that the very idea of interacting with a person with a wildly different background and communication styles is anxiety inducing, so they find a way around it.<p>The slights won't stop until you leave the comfort bubble, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Something like this happened at UW. I remember going to a diversity career fair in 2015 and Uber had a booth there.<p>Turns out they were there to recruit drivers to drive for Uber.
Go browse Blind for a few hours and you'll see how people really feel about these issues. I know some of the comments are in the minority, but even then, some of the comments are straight up vile.
When I was coming out of school, non-prestige schools (and locales) were simply <i>left out of recruiting altogether</i>. I graduated literally first in my class year, with a BS in CS and Business Administration minor... and wasn't pursued at all. Meanwhile, I already had a software engineering career going, enjoying the setting and challenge as well, and I wasn't particularly concerned at the time. I had developed a skill set spanning both programming and computing center operations (having started there), and I was pretty invaluable in my group from the outset, and the recognition was really valuable to me.<p>So, you'd think that management in my group (at least) might consider panning for additional nuggets in the same stream (top performers at lower-prestige schools), right?<p>No.<p>The hiring manager did recruiting trips where he wanted to travel. New York. Hawai'i. Etc.<p>He'd hire one candidate from each locale, apparently to justify the trip. Attractive female candidates didn't even have to meet the official policy constraints (a <i>Sociology</i> degree is not CS, engineering, or even BA, sir).<p>Eventually, I got recruited elsewhere not by any standard channel but by a personal friend.<p>Not everyone is born into resources. I had to both support myself and put myself through school. That constrained my choices and forced me to be resilient in ways peers my age didn't need to be. Employers who hire by formula completely omit my kind.
What I struggle with when it comes to claims of {whatever group} bias as a cause (the correlation is easy, but I stress "cause") for why any given industry or sector of the economy doesn't represent a desired mix of group attributes is this: There are millions or even tens of millions of actors involved in these economic models and if group attribute bias is driving these hiring or promotion or pay decisions then that means, by definition, that the motivation of bias is overriding the motivation to optimize for value (whether it be NOI for a mature business or speed of market capture for a new one).<p>So what I don't get is, if everything else is equal between two candidates except for a) their contribution to value and b) their group attribute, how is it that so many actors choose b and leave a on the table thus knowingly performing poorer for shareholders and risking failure at the hands of competition purely because of a group attribute bias?<p>I get that there would be some actors that would choose bias over value. But how is that no one break ranks. Wouldn't there have to be a massive amount of collusion and coordination to make sure that every founder and manager from every entity all agrees to do this? Because anyone that breaks from the mold would end up benefiting financially.<p>I get that this perspective undermines the popular narrative, so go ahead and down vote if you think my intention is to do that. But that's not my intention. What I'm looking for is a rational description of how the economic mechanics work with a popular narrative about bias against what is also a popular narrative that humans are greedy?
I wonder if there’s some self-fulfilling prophesy with the recruiters.<p>If they put forth a half-assed effort at a “lesser” school I have a feeling the best and brightest at that school would feel that and be less than receptive about working there. Meaning they only get serious inquiries from less-than-stellar recruits leading hiring managers to feel that school isn’t worth more effort.<p>If I show up to dates in pajamas it seems odd to come to the conclusion that my dating pool doesn’t meet my standards
I went to a large state school, Rutgers, and have worked both with people from Ivy League schools and other state schools.<p>You could swap out UNC and NC A&T with "Ivy League" and "State School" and you would effectively get the same story. And yes, 100% there are tech companies who put a premium on Ivy League vs non-Ivy League based on my own personal experience with recruiting.<p>Dan Luu (mentioned in the original article) has previously talked about this along the lines of (paraphrasing): "I went to #25 of the top 25 schools. Friends of mine, who were better potential hires, went to #26 and got substantially fewer offers and the offers were lower quality".<p>If there are biases in how companies treat you based on solely the university you went to, I find it easy to believe that there could be other biases as well.
NC A&T has an average SAT score on par with any random flyover college. Yet I don't see any tech recruiters making the trip out to Bemidji State. The fact is that students at HBCUs are significantly advantaged in recruiting compared to any comparable college.
There are a lot of people here reinventing Sabermetrics.<p>Go on, read Moneyball, and consider that the selection criteria from top-ranked universities may be low-quality indicators of success at actually getting things done.
In India I've seen bias against different groups, regions, religions, languages etc. in hiring, promotions. The only difference is that everyone has bias against everyone to a level that one can't point out which group is more biased. It evens out I guess
Maybe it's the style of the article but I'm not sure I get the point. Is the complaint that tech is "too white"? If so, that doesn't seem true. Look for example at Google's own internal reporting: Whites are only something like 55-60% of the workforce, with Asians at 35-40%. Once you account for population totals overall, Whites are underrepresented. And I'm sure the same is true at Microsoft.<p>Is the point then that there just aren't many Blacks? Are Asians in the tech industry not part of the "minority" in the context of this conversation? Sorry but I'm losing track too quickly of what is even being discussed.
when 36% of google can be asian, majority coming from a different country and most probably a much poorer per capita income then anyone in USA. I don't really think anyone was discriminating, go to any top tech school and see the percentage of people by race and you'll pretty much see the same in companies. if anything there's a supply shortage of tech talent I'm pretty sure they don't need to discriminate if someone is good enough
As someone just starting to grow a development team (currently four people) in Denver CO, I’m already thinking about how to build a diverse group. Does anyone have any resources, books, or maybe just some plain common sense advice to recommend?
Practically companies outsource the recruitment process to schools. To get in a top school you need to have passed certain filters so it is more likely that talent can be found there. It's applicable is any country not just USA and in sports as well.<p>It's a hierarchy building system that works but of course it's not perfect.<p>If you are presuming that untapped talent exists in lower ranking schools on a large scale, companies would shift their recruiting strategies because people from top schools require much higher starting salaries. Leading companies recruit from top schools to remain in the front.<p>The hypothesis that some groups (black, women, lgbt, etc) are systematically marginalised is not compatible with capitalism. While it has an element of truth due to the in-group preference (which a very natural phenomenon - even trees do it) in a ruthless market companies which discriminate are at a loss - they loose star employees and eventually their leading position. If huge untapped potential exists in the marginalised groups this would create a market opportunity: companies could only hire from these groups and outperform the others. I don't see this happening.
This absolutely enraging, but I'd like to also point out that the author's own alma mater is about equidistant from UNC and Duke and was not visited. Why was that? Its absolutely disgusting that they treated A&T's stop this way but what's the excuse for excluding NC State?
Wow, that's really fucking terrible. That should have brought up so many red flags. At this point I'm of the opinion that sensitivity training shouldn't be something done post facto as an apology. Give sensitivity training to everybody preemptively. First, sensitivity training is not and should not be a punishment. We should all be at best excited and at worst neutral about expanding our worldview and learning from others. Second, we shouldn't have this weird system where Alice calls Bob out, HR makes Bob do sensitivity training, Bob has some resentment for being embarrassed and Alice still doesn't feel comfortable around Bob.<p>Also sensitivity training isn't the best name. It practically writes its own insults. Maybe call it something like diversity promotion or anti-racism training. It's a lot harder to opt out to anti-racism training.<p>We all have blind spots. We need to erase them. Let's do it together.
Pretty weird that the story doesn't involve him bringing up the problem with HR or other engineering managers. The people who do the main revenue-generating work of a company (e.g. engineers in a tech company, the finance people in an investment bank) usually have a lot more power in an organization than HR / recruiting. So if he didn't do that, does that make him complicit in the racism? Or if he did try and got stonewalled, he should share that, along with the name of the company.<p>And it doesn't smell right that an organization would risk giving a bunch of candidates food poisoning and getting a lawsuit by serving them day-old catered food. I'm certainly willing to believe it <i>could</i> happen, but 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' - in this case I'd settle for him giving the name of the company so that either others can confirm, or they can rebut.